Every month my wife chides me: "Are you going to write about something boring again or will your article finally be about something exciting?" While I sure wish I could make my article something everyone anxiously awaits each month, there are good reasons why I do not.

The most obvious reason is that what I write is not read until at least a month later. If I write about an item that is the hot topic today, it will hopefully be passe in six weeks.

This has not necessarily been the case for previous AERC presidents. Up until two years ago, the AERC board of directors met at most twice a year. If the president wrote an article about a hot topic that the board needed to consider, the president could be certain that it would still be an unanswered item two months later. Now the AERC board meets at least once every month. If a topic is very controversial today, by the time you read this, it better have been discussed and assigned to a committee for handling.

One less obvious reason for my columns being boring is that I do not want to steal anyone else's thunder. The way AERC business is handled has changed dramatically over the past two years. While this has been a slow evolution for many years, it has become most evident recently.

A decade ago, AERC was run by the board of directors. The board consisted of 20-plus people who were able to handle all of the matters of the organization, including much of the major office operations, and everything related to the sport of endurance. There were many committees, but they brought ideas to the board and the board debated an idea and then they might form a rule change from that idea. If a committee, such as the Veterinary or International Committee, were to bring fully thought-out ideas to the board they were considered to be doing the board's job and trying to take over AERC.

Today, committees are where the bulk of the work of AERC is done. The board provides vision and strategic direction (aka long-range planning). Now when a hot topic arises, either a committee starts work on it immediately, or it comes before the board and the board assigns it to a specific committee to oversee. The committees must return with well thought-out written motions for the board to act upon.

No longer does the AERC Executive Committee run the day-to-day operations--the AERC office staff is extremely professional and has flourished without the board trying to oversee their every move.

My goal is to have direct member input into every action by the board. No action should be taken by the board without the issue having already been fully considered by at least one committee. If any member feels strongly about any topic, they can ask to be on the committee overseeing that topic. (Be careful volunteering to be a member of a committee--you could wind up years later having to write this column.)

As you see, if I were to announce something quite exciting, then it would be exciting because of the efforts of an AERC committee. There are so many people working so hard for the betterment of the sport of endurance that even just an itemization of all the work in progress today by the committees would take this entire page. As such, I will not steal the glory for their efforts. I will state that all of my achievements as president of AERC have been due to the work of hundreds of AERC members on nearly 30 different standing and ad hoc committees.

Now back to your regularly scheduled boring article.

Ride. Really ride.