I am not the sort of person who makes New Year’s Resolutions. But if I were, one I’d have been consistently breaking every year for the past decade is making a more concerted effort to centralize and market my #content. So I will periodically recap my recent work on this blog—which, as an ancillary benefit, also gives people a reason to read it once in a while.
Do it for the ‘Gram
As of Jan 1, I am attempting daily short-form content on Instagram at @howtheracewaswon. If this sounds familiar, you’re not crazy—scroll down far enough on that IG account and you’ll find some mini-How The Race Was Won® content from the late-Teens.
As it turns out, mini-HTRWW is substantially less efficient per unit time than regular HTRWW. So this will definitely not be that.
The hope initially was to get better at using the native Instagram tools, refine my mobile-first chops, and gather data on what works/what doesn’t. But then Wiggo and Pidcock went and shared a reel and all that’s nuked. I shall take false comfort in this Emperor’s new cloak of Impressive Looking Numbers.
Nobody’s Listening
A week after savaging the Outside Business Entity for its clown-shoes MBA approach to content, the job postings that triggered the diatribe remain live and as garbage as ever. The response, both public and otherwise, has been a shared sense of frustrated agreement. I have a lot of Very Interesting Ideas for continued work on this topic. The hard part will be deciding which direction to go in, and finding the time to get there…
Charles Pelkey GoFundMe
As you might infer from that previous item (or the nearly two-decades of archival material on this blog) my relationship with the broader cycling ecosystem has always been thorny. My grandmother used to say you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. I never saw that as a reason not to own a flyswatter, but as it turns out, certain thin-skinned bro cultures are particularly un-psyched about getting smacked.
Charles Pelkey, then an editor at VeloNews, was one of the first “established” figures in cycling to acknowledge that I made entertaining and insightful points—even if they did frequently come at his publication’s expense. After completing his law degree and being laid off during an earlier round of outdoor media consolidation, Pelkey survived breast cancer and mean Lance Armstrong tweets to become Wyoming House Minority Whip.
If that sounds like an unorthodox career progression, it is. But in a substantially more commonplace turn (in the US, at least) recent health issues have put Pelkey in something of a financial bind. While I’ve already chipped in, and the fundraising goals have been exceeded, I’d still be remiss if I didn’t pass the hat.