The kids tried to convince us this morning that Halloween is a national holiday and is the reason why there's no school tomorrow. Nice try, kids. We all know the truth.
Registration for the 2027 edition of the Wente 8 Hour MTB race weekend opens Sunday, and families need the extra day to take care of preparing for a double-header: a late night on Saturday with an early-morning wake-up call on Sunday to register for the best weekend of the year. Some schools are sensitive to the fact that teachers' union needs Friday off so they can form their teams because Saturday is already booked 👻
We don't write the facts; we just report them.
For two decades we've managed our own registration platform, cobbled together with off-the-shelf solutions and a sprinkle of house code to save money and time. But that still required a lot of work on our part. It was good enough for other organizations to use it, but we've wanted to make it better, and we have.
Our objective was to make things that ate our time (and yours) go away: cancelling, changing teammates, upgrading, downgrading, changing team names, changing addresses, transferring, chasing your friends down for money... Ya'll are a finicky bunch.
In the spirit of honoring the 8-hour race format when the little things can really add up, we've worked to automate as much of managing your wishy-washiness as possible. So, with that, please welcome to our new registration platform, Plantains.
Now, when you register for one of our events, you can handle all of this stuff without having to wait around for one of our team members (Erica) to get back to you.
Registering a team and want your teammates to pay their portion themselves? You can do that. Just check the box next to your teammates. All you need to do is provide their name and email; they fill out the rest.
We used to charge twenty bucks for the hassle of people changing their minds because it was a time-suck for us. Now you can just do it yourself. It doesn't require any effort on our part until the event is upon us, so until May 1st this process is entirely free, and self-administered. After May 1st, it'll be $20 because it bears some additional effort on our part closer to the event, but the process for you is still automatic.
This isn't a Cinderella story, so these trails don't rake themselves. We do, and even when we do, they just get un-raked, so we've got to do it every single year. That's the half of it... the berms need TLC, fallen trees need clearing, and bridges need repair. There's work to be done, and we need your help. But it's a super fun weekend together in a magical place that you get to experience in a different way when you help out. Stay tuned for the official opening of sign-ups for trail work weekends coming soon.
Set your clocks for this Sunday at 7:00 AM Pacific, and point your browsers here to get signed up to celebrate 12 years hosting our 8-hour mountain bike extravaganza at the magical Wente Scout Reservation.
May your pillowcases be full of candy.
Love,
The cast and crew at Bike Monkey.
Registration opens sunday
Wente 2027
Prepare Friday
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