Some of the theads about riding in groups & being worried about pacing + bike handling skills of triathletes got me thinking, in light of a ride I had this weekend.
I normally train and ride on my own. Even with swimming, I’ll swim with masters in the off-season, but tend to do my own swimming when tri season ramps up. Nevertheless, I do enjoy riding in groups and decided this weekend to ride with a local road club, of which I’m a quiet member.
I originally planned to ride easy and do a transition run of about 45 minutes after the ride. I went out with a groupetto that was supposed to maintain a “moderate” pace on a 28 mile loop. My group left after the “fast” 28 mile group started about a minute ahead.
Unfortunately, my computer lost all juice as I rode out to the start, so I couldn’t see our speeds accurately. Note to self: buy new battery.
Well, the paceline started with a 17-18 mph pace that I thought was comfortable, but as soon as we got on a long straight part of the loop, I noticed the front 2-3 riders of the paceline was getting ahead of the rest. Since I had fell into the line in the middle, I decided after noticing that no one was trying to bridge after 30 seconds, that I might try to do some work and draw our group up. I rode up to the front and started pulling. We reeled in the leads, and they started falling back for rest. All was well and we stayed as a group until some hills blasted apart the line again. The same 3 rode off, this time with me making the 4th. I fall back to the tail after a period of pulling and look back to see the 2nd half of our group way back. By this time, we’ve passed a few of the other groupettos that started before us, including the “fast” group doing the same loop. This was when I realized we were going at too strong a pace.
I was torn. I initially felt bad, and fell off the front to see if I can help pull up the dropped group. After riding in “no mans land” for a bit, the back half caught up and I started an effort to reel in the leads. Fortunately, they had slacked off the pace a bit as they also noticed the gap. Eventually, the gap returned, and I just gave up going back and forth. Of course, my “easy/moderate” ride plan was shot, and I hadn’t brought nutrition with me thinking I’d just be doing an easy spin. Towards the end, it was myself and another guy. In the last mile, he suggested doing 30 seconds intervals on the front. I duly agreed despite my legs feeling dead. After my pull, I fell off and watched him blow by without any chance of me staying on his wheel.
Anyway. This initial group of about 6-7 cyclists was comprised of both men and women. Old and young. At the end, someone from the slower tail-end, who’s computer worked said that we maintained a 20mph average. Definitely faster than I planned, especially with all the work I put in.
What’s the point in this post? In a group, you just never know what might happen. The dynamics are such that you can’t necessarily count on a very specific pace. Nevertheless, it’s all ultimately your choice what you’ll do. You can take turns pulling, or just ride on someone elses wheel the whole time, or decide you didn’t like the pace and either break away or fall off.
The only times I’ve ever taken a bike I don’t nomally train or race on for a leisurely ride is with a girlfriend or friends doing things like riding to the market, park, etc. I would never assume that I can’t get a good workout with a ride group that only planned an easy pace. Heck… just pull that group through the whole workout. I’m sure folks might get a kick out of a higher avg. speed with the same effort.
On bike handling & roadies vs. trigeeks: when I first joined this road club, and showed up in my triathlon team jersey, I got a lot of “oh no… unsafe tri-geek…” etc, looks and comments. Oddly enough, plenty of folks on my tri-team are also members of this bike club. Nevertheless, it was funny to have the ride leader remind me not to ride on the aerobars when I’m in a paceline, only to look at my drop bars and notice I didn’t have any installed. 
I knew better than to bring my TT bike to a group ride. Of course, when folks noticed I could hold a paceline at a good steady rate and loved working up front on pulls, especially up climbs and could handle my bike on sharp turns, etc. those comments pretty much went away and folks started introducing themselves to me.
The thing is, I don’t specifically practice and work on my bike handling skills. Not that I’ve never done that before, at a clinic or two (run by my triclub) but I don’t focus on it. I think it just comes from time on the road, in the saddle. Much like swimming, cycling is a technical and balance dependant skill. The only way to develop skill is to put the time in.
That said, I think a lot of folks coming into triathlons, especially now as the sport seems to be growing fast, might come from backgrounds where they might not have cycled a lot.
I’ve never been a licensed cyclist, nor even what I’d consider a dedicated rec. rider, but have always been enamored with the sport since pretty much the day when I got my first touring road bike in the 8th grade as an elementary school graduation present to myself (after scrimping and saving my allowances & lunch money for a couple years). Heh… my first helmet was a cheesy model from Bell called “Break-Away” – people would see the words in the graphic and ask if the helmet was meant to fall apart on impact. I would laugh and say it’s a cycling term and ask if they saw the movie “Breaking Away?”
My first long ride was a solo metric century from Boston->Falmouth as a high school senior to join up with my graduating class (1987) that was bussed down, on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. Somewhere in between then and now, my road bike (a Lotus touring bike) got stuffed in the basement of my childhood home and my interest went to other areas after college as I lived in various locales far from Boston. When I returned in 2000, I rediscovered my old bike and found it was still in half decent shape other than rusted cables, a worn free-wheel, and stretched chain. I cleaned it up and entered my first triathlon. My training consisted of bicycle commuting to work and moderate distance rides on the weekends. Despite a chain that constantly slipped anytime I applied power (remember the worn freewheel & stretched chain?), I fell in love with the sport. So much so, I bought my first real road bike a few weeks after my first triathlon – the late-season Monster Challenge aka Boston Triathlon.
This is a long-winded way of saying that, I came into the sport on a whim, with inadequate equipment, barely a sound training method. The only advantage I had were skills I learned as a kid growing up on bikes (before my first road bike, I was riding around town and doing ramps/jumps with friends on early BMX bikes throughout elementary school).
Someone mentioned rollers in the thread on bike handling. The shop I bought my first racing/training road bike from happened to have a customer who had brought in some old rollers and suggested they give it to the next person who needs one. When I asked if they had recommendations for off-season road training, as I was buying in the fall having completed the late-season tri as my first, they setup the rollers in the shop and said “try these out.”
After helping me get started on them (funny scene: two shop employees, on both sides of me, holding me up until I started spinning and staying there spotting me the whole time), and seeing that I was able to stay on for a good 30 minutes or so, they said “these are perfect for you, and they’re free!”
If more triathletes and cyclists used rollers in the off-season, maybe we’d all be happier?