While I love bicycling, my real lady in red, whom I visit every winter, is ski jumping (I have been for several years the oldest active ski jumper in North America). My largest web-page undertaking is a double site, for Eastern U.S. Ski Jumping and for U.S. and World Masters Ski Jumping. [ Take a look.] I have also created personal (indeed, private) web-based scrapbooks documenting various personal trips and activities.

The internet is the perfect medium for niche activities. It is cheap and easy and available to all, wherever they live. For several years, I have thought about posting our Time Trial results on the internet. I knew how to do it; I had a place to do it; and I thought it might be worth the effort. Now I have begun, and we'll see how it is received.

In the summer, I hope to post current results each week. At season's end, I plan also to post season summaries, though that might be done during the season as well, with season-best times for each rider.

Over the more than thirty years of the local Time Trial, one constant, in addition the out-and-back course on Lake Shore Rd, has been the Wests, Barbara and Don. I think that I rode in the very first event, and I don't believe that there was a year when I didn't ride. I have no doubt posted more finishes than any other rider, probably twice as many as the next one. Barbara has also ridden many times, and has held the watch and clipboard more times than anyone else, maybe ten times as many at the next.

We are the only ones who could sit down and record the history of the event, because we are the only ones who have been involved from the beginning until the present.

Mary Duprey has also taken care of the results many times and in recent seasons, she has sent us all copies by e-mail. This has made my collections of digital results quite complete over the last few years. For the earlier years, my digital collection contains only those results that I prepared myself. However, for decades I have tried to cut out, date and save the clippings from the Press Republican.

When I set out to create a web page with an entire season's results, I start by assembling my digital results for that year in a folder on my computer. Those from the 486 days were done in WordPerfect so I use Microsoft Word to open them, then immediately copy and past the entire contents of each week's file into a single text file in Notepad. I also note the dates for which I lack digital results. When I have collected all my digital results in a single text file, I search my collection of newspaper clippings to try to fill in the blank weeks. These I must type in manually, a slow process for me, with repeated checking for accuracy. Obviously this leaves some season listings incomplete, and I seldom know when a missing week was a rainout and when I simply lack the results. I ask all interested readers for their help in this regard. If you see a blank week and you know it was a rainout, or if you know it was not, please let us know.

When I have my most complete listing of results for that season all on one text file, the fun begins as I do a dance from one computer application to another and back again. With hand-editing, I get the data tabulated in a way that I can load it into an Excel spreadsheet. The web page language HTML does not respect tabs, and I choose not to use HTML tables for the results, so I must use spaces to format my data into columns. Excel does this very nicely with its .prn output format.

In a few recent years, I have prepared an Excel spreadsheet listing the entire season's results, not in week-by-week blocks, but as a table with a row for each rider and a column for each week's times. I also use the power of Excel formulas to keep each rider's best time and the number of weeks of participation. (I have posted these along with the week-by-week results for anyone interested in doing further analysis.) At the bottom of the week-by-week results pages, I have posted the list of all the riders with those season-best times and numbers of weeks of participationd, and at the top of the page, I give some season statistics. For those few recent seasons in which I kept a running Excel table of complete results, this was easy and natural. For the other seasons, I have developed a way, again using the sorting power of Excel, to extract this information without much manual labor, so I have continued to include the introductory stats and the final list of all the riders.

As time goes by, I hope also to post results from earlier years, some complete, some simply snapshots, and I may find some pictures to add. Indeed, if you have some pictures or other material to share, I'd appreciate receiving them.