yashicamat said:
I am curious about this after being told that the local cycling club members apparently average well over 20mph on a ride (and this area is fairly hilly too). On a reasonably level ride (eg., the 21 mile circular I did the other day which had about 900ft of climb on it) I average about 16mph on my SS - if I really work hard I can get this up to about 18mph. This still seems to fall way short of what I've heard about averages . . . .
Is this me being unfit? Hence the poll - say over a typical 20-40mile ride. Cheers.
You can average over 20mph, but over a loop (i.e. starting and finishing in the same place) of reasonable distance (say > 20miles), it's pretty hard, for mere mortals. 18mph is good.
A lot of people do talk quite a lot of billy bullshit about their averages - the most common of which being the claim people make to average such and such a speed, when what they actually mean is that that was their average *
over a certain section*.
As a general rule, most club runs average 16-18mph, a chaingang will probably average between 22-25mph, but they are tailing each other closely and swapping the leader constantly, and they don't keep up that speed for long - even so they are quite hard to keep up with. I'm going to have a go this year when I've been on a few more club runs - it's good for the experience even if you get dropped. Apparently what happens some of the time is that they will go all out to a certain point where they will ease off to let the people that have been dropped catch up.
If your local club says their *
normal club run* averages 'well over 20' then IF it's true, which it might be, then that's abnormally fast. There's no shame in asking them if there's a slower club run that they do that you could go on, or a different club - because most people couldn't keep up with that. It might be worth asking them if they mean their chain gang does that sort of average, and their normal club run is slower - because that would sound more likely to me.