Beyond Virtuality… The Meet-Ups! – Podium Cafe

Maybe everybody thinks they were born at exactly the right time, but personally I can make a pretty good case. I can say I remember the 60s (maybe a couple days?), I saw Apocalypse Now! in theaters, and a bunch of other stuff, but all of that is debatable. What is not is that people my age have the healthiest understanding of modern technology, especially the internet. We can remember clearly what life was like before it. [Funny story, I used to play basketball in my friend’s driveway while, I found out much later, his dad was helping to invent the internet, sometimes just 100 feet away in his home office.] We have the pre-internet perspective of how life was, and I’m not just talking about being able to use a rotary phone.

And yet, I was young and childless enough (then) to be able to engage with the ‘net to a reasonable degree, particularly social media. Starting as it did in 2006, the Podium Cafe was populated for a while by people unaccustomed to making online friends. We were the last generation to be suspicious of relationships that didn’t form face-to-face, but as opposed to our parents, we were open to the idea that it wasn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster, on par with picking up hitchhikers at night on the freeway.

So because this is a sports fan community, and a rather civil one compared to the ball sports world, we inevitably started planning in-person gatherings at races. I personally have been at six events where we got organized as a community and had a solid quorum, which are rounded up below. I know other PdC folks have done similar things. And because all of my experiences wound up confirming the real, meat-space-style friendships that I thought I was making online with you guys, I want to spend some time reliving the events we shared. Here we go!

2009 Amgen Tour of California

Background: Being in Seattle is not a great way to connect to pro cycling, at least logistically. You can meet the occasional athlete (hi Tyler Farrar!), but the events themselves are far away in both space and time. For a while, though, the Amgen Tour of California occupied a spot in the World Tour calendar, first as an elite February training stage race, and later as a more intense, but less well attended alternative to the Giro d’Italia in May. And it was a short flight to Seattle.

The…