Flexiperms - The Sequel
by Bob Koen

This was just an e mail message that permanets co-coordinator Bob Koen sent after reading Harold's permiflex thoughts. It reads a bit like a mission statement for the perminents. Good enough to share... [Eric F]

All of what you said makes good sense Harold. Such good sense that in fact, BC Randonneurs permanents have evolved to work pretty much the way you describe the early brevets as having worked.

- You can ride a permanent on any day you want except for the first day of a scheduled brevet in your region.
- You can start at any time you want.
- You can do any route that you want so long as its at least 200 km long and doesn't use the same section of road in the same direction twice in the same permanent.
- If you don't like any of the routes that currently exist in the archive, then just make up you own route. Just submit it to Tracy first for review. Even if you don't do that and ride it anyway as a "preride" there is a strong probability that the verifier dude (that's me) will give you credit for the ride.
- And if you do like an existing ride but wish that it started closer to your home, then we have a procedure for that also. You just have to scratch out a bunch of stuff on the control card and put in different start and finish controls. And work out the appropriate opening and closing times for the other controls.
- And you get extra time for extra distance. Permanents can be any distance over 200 km. You can ride 247 km if you want to and not have to squeeze it into the 13.5 hour 200 km time window.

So the permanents are about as flexible as we can figure out how to make them. The only real rules are that you need to ride at least 200 km, on a preplanned route with preplanned controls, and get to those controls within the standard opening and closing times. If you succeed then you get one attaboy (or attagirl), in writing on the BC Randos web site, and nothing else. What could be simpler?

November 6, 2010