Commentary1,264 words
What a hundred-mile season actually costs
The entry fee is the smallest number on the list.
A hundred-mile entry is $200 to $400. By the time you reach the start line you have usually also paid for a string of qualifiers, three or four years of lottery applications, flights, four nights in a mountain town in peak season, five pairs of shoes and a physio you had not budgeted for. Here is the whole number, added up. Including the part nobody writes down: the cost is predictable, but the timing is not, and spreading it is where people get caught. Consumer credit is a national market rather than an international one — in Spain, for instance, lenders such as Wandoo publish a representative APR against every product, and that is the figure to compare rather than the monthly payment.
