New Member "Getting Started" Guide

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If you're a new RUSA member, welcome!  This is a quick guide to the most important things to find out and do as a member.

   → Basics of Brevets and Randonneuring

Finding Events to Ride and Event Organizers

Events are organized under geographic Regions. Each region has a Regional Brevet Administrator (RBA) and an organizing club.

  • Searching for Rides Nearby - You can search for rides within a given distance of a point - for example, where you live, or where you might be traveling.
  • Search for Events - Here you can search nationally for all regions' events. You can search by one or more regions, distance, event type, etc. Each event listing includes a link to the organizing club's website, where you can find out more, register, and so forth.
  • Regions - This page lists each RUSA region, the RBA (with the RBA's contact info), the organizing club, and its website, where you can find out more about the club, events you're interested in, and contacts within the club. A map pinpointing each RUSA region is also available.

Finding and Riding RUSA Permanents

Permanents are routes you can ride at any time (conditions permitting), alone or with others. There is no RBA or organizing club. You find routes, register to ride them, and submit your result directly on the RUSA website.

Viewing Your Results

Organizing clubs may list riders' results for their events. Here's one example. But your results - both for events and Permanents - are also listed on the RUSA website. Only finishers are listed, and as with all results listings, they are in order of rider name, not finishing time, since randonneuring is non-competitive.

  • Search for Results - You can find your or any RUSA member's results here. Also the results for a given event, or for all a club's events for a certain year, all the results for a given Permanent route, and many other combinations. 
  • Your "Trophy Shelf" - For each year of your results, any awards you have earned are displayed as trophy icons next to the year.

Achieving Awards

There are a number of RUSA awards you can work towards as goals for yourself. Some are calendar year, some lifetime. Some reflect cumulative distance ridden, others a for riding in different geographies, or on different routes, or for riding throughout each of twelve months.

Some awards established by Audax Club Parisien, Les Randonneurs Mondiaux, and the Union des Audax Français (which are worldwide sanctioning organizations for randonneuring) are also available through RUSA, and are listed on our site.

Awardees are listed on the website and in the American Randonneur magazine. You can optionally purchase physical awards (medals, plaques, patches, etc.) through the RUSA Store.

Riding a Brevet or other Randonnée - The Basics

In randonneuring, you ride a prescribed course within a fairly generous time limit, and document that you've ridden through a series of checkpoints along the route. Randonnées can be from 100 km to over 1200 km in distance. Some randonnées have officials on the course. Others do not.

  • Rules for Riders - These are the rules for events. Similar rules for Permanents described below.
  • Proof of Passage options - to show that you've passed through the route's checkpoints - include store receipts, photos, GPS tracks and others. For events, the options allowed are determined by the event organizer.
  • Reflectivity and Lighting - Good lighting and reflective equipment are vital in randonneuring, because, as these are distance events, you may be riding at night, and also because visibility can be poor even during the day. 

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