Trimeon wrote:
I would be happy to help. I have ran a team for a bike shop and been sponsorship coordinator for team I raced bikes with through this month..
well, bless your heart. that's half the problem (partly) solved. i don't think anyone should be tasked with all of that by himself (you included). i would like to think we'd have regional ambassadors or managers, because the expression of such a community would be physical, and local, and in-person. but i think that's a detail. that shouldn't be too hard.
now for the other parts. to me, i'm just not that interested in the discounts thing. for two reasons. first, i don't think the team's reason for being should conflict with the businesses of local service and goods providers. let's take trishop plano as an example, because trent nix may well read this. i don't want to go to cervelo and wrangle a 10 or 15 percent discount instead of that bike coming to our metro-dallas members thru trent's shop. i'd rather than trent, of his own accord, recognize the benefit of doing business with such a club and decide how he might work with the club to the mutual benefit of all. just, on trent's terms. i would wager that trend could come up with something much more valuable to members than any discount the club could negotiate directly with a vendor. (i can think of several things i would do if i was trent that would crush any discount a club could wrangle).
second, if slowtwitch was going to have its own club, i would want our ambitions to be grand. i'm 60. i can see the distant lights of the runway guiding my tenure as a multisporter in for a landing. i'm still afloat. i'm still flapping my wings. but nobody lives forever. in whatever time i have left i would want a slowtwitch club effort to have a mission or missions that were both inward and outward facing. rather than simply edifying ourselves i'd like to use our collective strength to good purpose. i'm specifically animated by the preservation, use, championing of our public lands. now more than ever, as we are about ready to basically privatize for heavy industry 2 million acres of the land currently held in public trust, i feel like using my voice to express what public lands have meant to me and will continue to mean to the citizens of this country.
so, whether it's this issue that animates me, or other themes important to you who live in atlanta or milwaukee or seattle or wherever, i would hope that a slowtwitch team means more than a jersey.
finally, there is one axiom that permeates everything i do or have always done on slowtwitch: we aren't swim/bike/run. we are getting from point A to B under human powered locomotion. we are about finding new and unique ways, thru technology, thru imagination, thru the power of community, to make that journey. if i have "one more left in me" it's probably going to be in the race production arena. i really wouldn't want to gin up interest in a club if that club's interest didn't include new, novel, unique expressions of multisport.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman
