The idea of Global Gutz is to have a live traffic bicycle courier race in lots of cities all over the world, starting simultaneously, e.g. at 1 p.m. in San Francisco, and 4 p.m. in New York, etc. and held over a given distance and a given amount of checkpoints in an effort to try to make race conditions as equal as possible for everyone. This way we can have a world wide competition without spending a lot of money for traveling somewhere. Everyone will just be racing in their hometown knowing that in various cities around the world there are messengers racing with or against them, and the first male and female competitors to finish will be the lucky winners.
Why is this idea so fresh? First of all, it doesn’t take much of an effort to organize. Then, everybody gets to stay home and still race in an international courier competition, and finally we all have the chance to be part of something greater than our daily strive and maybe win and be the fastest in your city or the world.
One fact proved difficult in the first global gutz: we couldn’t find a format to allow for everybody to race at a decent time (i.e. either the Australians or the U.S. west coast would have had to start early in the morning). This made us think that we should have two “time zones”
This year the cities can choose between 2 time zones to race.
Time zone 1 is on Saturday June 19. Start time for Los Angeles would be 4 am. Start time for London would be noon. Start time for Sydney would be 10 pm.
Time zone 2 is on Saturday June 19. Start time for Los Angeles would be 1 pm. Start time for London would be 9 pm. Start time for Sydney would be Sunday June 20 6am.
Cities can choose which time zone is best for them. Surely for some cities only one of the starting times makes sense.
LA 1pm
Chicago 3pm
NYC 4pm
London noon or 9pm
Berlin 1pm or 10pm
Zimbabwe 2p or 11pm
Tokyo 9pm
Sydney 10pm
Cities are encouraged to post their course online so that we can see each others courses. A simple course via gmaps will do. Send the map link to info@globalgutz.org (But don’t make your course map public until after the race)
Setting up a Global Gutz race in your hometown is simple. See the rules.
