PALM Statistics

Since we have 786 people registered, I made a first pass at generating PALM statistics. I've posted them to the website. There are a few things that I notice. We have 225 people who are on the PALM for the first time. This is 29% of the people on PALM. This may seem like a lot but last year 35% of our riders were doing their first PALM and the year before that it was 45%. We've reached our 700 cutoff the last three years: 2006 in the middle of April, 2007 in the middle of March, and this year in the middle of February. Before 2006 no one remembers reaching the cutoff. In 2006 a lot of our regular riders were caught off guard and missed the cutoff. That's why there were so many first timers in 2006. By 2008 people figured out that they have to register early. If you didn't get a registration mailed to you this year, the odds of getting on PALM weren't good. (I didn't enter many new names and addresses during this year's registration. Most of the first timers this year were already on our mailing list and were mailed an application. )

The age band counts have some differences too. Notice that the number of 10-20 year olds is down this year and that the smallest age band is now 0 to 9. (Traditionally its been the 20 -29 age band.) One reason for the drop of 10 - 19 year olds is that we don't have the St Hubert's youth group with us this year. (They have been riding PALM every other year.)

Last year's PALM was the longest six day PALM that we've ever done, almost every day was 50 miles. We drew hot weather last year, high 80's to 90 for the first three days. This year we made sure that we mixed in some shorter days with the longer ones. (If you want to do longer miles, we offer optionals on our routes. We've always done this.) Weatherwise, we made sure that winter went on much longer in 2008. This year we had to raise our registration fees. Because of the rise in gas prices and schools we were losing thousands of dollars. We raised adult more than child and teen fees to keep PALM affordable for families. And this year, we filled early. If you look at the statistics, the median number of PALMs that a rider has ridden is 4. The number of riders drops greatly after 5 PALMs. It is very important for us that we attract new riders. One of PALM's missions is to encourage family biking by providing an affordable biking vacation. Attacting families is very important to us. I hope that the reason the number of first timers and 0 - 19 year olds are down is that we closed early, not a reaction to last year's route or the increase in fees.