have you ever known?---Cycling Group Ride Breakdown & Tactics

Posted by tan xiao yan on

Have you ever known---Cycling Group Ride Breakdown & Tactics

Cycling group is a team work and inevitably there will exist some ride breakdowns on your way. Here I will use a real example to have a discussion about the challenges and provide some my coping strategy.



This is I did a lot of workouts before this ride

Basically the total ride with 6cycling group2 miles three and a half hours. I did a lot of intervals during this day, and then end it off with the super fast group. The group riding in itself was about 13 miles, for me, they go to a turnaround point and then sprint back, it’s just one wakes. I ride home spent 33 minutes average powers 248, ax power was 2015 average 22.8. But you can see my 5 10 and 30-second keep powers all came from the very last of the sprint. I had a one minute into peak power on the initial climb, so I’m going to walk you through some of the tips and tricks that I’ve seen on group rides. But again for me, I’ve already done two separate workouts so that my goal for this ride was to win. I wanted to reenact a rave environment with a ton of fatigue in my legs, so your goals for group rides might be different than my goal for this group ride.



Cycling Group Ride Breakdown



Usually, I’m out there for workouts and on a group ride, you can do some cool stuff like trying things you would never have tried before, going off the front that sort of thing and so on. This ride on the flats you do a pace line on the way out, but a lot of times it’s pretty windy. So I go to the front and I pull decently hard, but nothing you know just like what everyone else is pulling about, trying to blow myself up and then, what happened is that I sort of got into a cycle where I went all the way to the back. There are maybe 30 guys here, 35 guys and I end up going hopeful way to the back. And while I’m back here, everything starts to blow up on the front, it gets strong out, the gap starts opening. So I am in a bad situation where I could possibly miss the lead group here because of just the luck of the draw, this guy comes up and he’s pretty much the last one on the group. Because we’ve in the very back, and all these gaps are opening up, you can see right here just that’ no good. The thing is that this ride has cat5 to count ones on it, so the fitness discrepancy open gaps like that and so, if you’re not paying attention man, you can definitely easily get split off from the group and I lucked out by having this. When we are getting pretty tired, everyone single file. Everyone may be going to start slowcycling grouping down, then the gap is going to open up. There's now a huge gap, that’s why I’m having to close down a massive hole here. And I’m just putting out it kind of watts and you can see guys are just getting the flick. And the thing is though that you can see now starts to slow down and this happens in races and group rides all the time we’ll go.



Tactics

Go on the wheel and conserve as much energy because there are some super strong guys on this ride and it’s going to get really fast towards the end. So it’s important to conserve your energy.

Go towards the front of the group

If you have a goal in your mind, it can stimulate you to go on and catch up the group when you drop behind. So then I get toward the front of the group and start to make my pool and make my contribution to close down the gap, we’ve pretty much shed half of everyone

The really key is that I’m going to do a pace my hardest pace that I possibly can do and still have energy or matches at the top because on that when you get on a climb especially with really fast guys.cycling group

Fill the gap

When one guy slows down, the gap is going to open up, I go to get on this guy’s wheel and fill that gap and go on guys wheels.

Trying to "win" a group ride

You can have a competition with your teammates, with challenges your journey will be more interesting and funny, and you will be more passionate to complete your goal.

Don’t trust what a guy said easily.

Most of the time maybe in group rides is different but most of the time they’re not telling the truth they had told. Don’t believe anyone that says that so now this is the part of the course that’s flat. Though this is a little kicker, we’ve got the breakaway established. we all attacked each other pretty good so we’re going to start working together but added at a point of I don’t trust you, working together so I’m going to go super hard. Especially when you decide to make a competition, they will say something negative to confuse you, this is the skill to win too.



After all, whatever the ride breakdowns are, there are the tactics to deal with, cycling group is not always with ride breakdown but with many other good aspects as well. So, if you are still riding alone, why not try to join a group and start a new and different journey? I believe with tactics, you can overcome the cycling group ride breakdown.