Saturday 6/17 - A hard workout, or was it?

Today's ride was a definite first for me. My first relatively fast paced group ride and my first time working in a pace line. And I rode a route that is about as flat as you can get around here.

I had emailed the list for the local cycling group to see if anyone was getting together a ride for Saturday that would fit in with the 3 hour I had scheduled. I got a reply about a ride forming in Lancaster that would probably suit me. So I traveled the 30 miles over there and took part in a ride that was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

The terrain of the ride was rolling to nearly flat. We did an out and back, of which the first 25 miles or so was rolling then the next 12 or so was nearly flat. Overall, the ride averaged just .2% grade, about as low as I've ever been on, with only 1500' of climbing in 73.17 miles. If that isn't the flatest bit of riding I've done, its pretty danged close. The central 15 miles, so about the last 7.5 miles of the outbound leg and the first 7.5 of the return, averaged 0% grade. This is the route I'm planning my first century on next week, so this was a nice taste and gives me a good idea of what sort of pacing I can do.

The group part of the ride was a lot of fun. The main point of the ride was as a training ride for one lady who is getting ready for a ride for cancer coming up in a month or so and the pace was around 18 mph. We pretty much all stayed together for the first 42 minutes and I hung out at the back, just mainly watching how the group moved and working on gettin more comfortable riding close to other folks. I found over the course of the ride that I still have a lot of work to do in this regard as I kept losing contact when I was the tail rider and had to work harder to get back in the draft.

After about 42 minutes a few of us took off and picked up the pace and for the next 30 minutes I averaged 21.1mph. We stopped at a little store in a town called Bloomfield and regrouped before moving on. That was the one thing I didn't really like about the ride, although it made it more social. The stopping. We stopped 3 times during the ride. I'm more used to just riding straight on with no real stops. But as I said, the stops did make the ride more social which was, for me any way, part of the point.

After the first stop, we had a stretch of about 40 minutes where we averaged 19.8mph. Then we had another stop. Coming back from this second stop to the third stop, in the same place as our first, took about the same amount of time (40 minutes) and we averaged nearly the same speed. This was coming back into a bit of a headwind, but five of us also worked on forming a paceline trying to keep a 20mph pace, which we pretty nearly did. This was the fun new thing for me, as I'd never had a chance to do this before. I learned a lot during this first bit of pacelining. One, I need to look back more when I'm pulling as a couple of times I pulled too hard up a hill and dropped everyone and didn't notice til I was 100 yards ahead. The other big thing is that I need to work on slipping back into the end of the line after my pull. I was often losing contact with the end of the line and would have to work harder to catch up. It wasn't so bad when I had someone behind me, but when I was the tail I seemed to lose focus more or something.

After our last stop, the most experienced guy in the group that was doing the paceline said he wanted to pick up the pace on the last 25 miles, to something around 23 mph or so. The one woman who had been in the paceline earlier didn't join back up as she said she didn't want to slow us down. Once we got warmed back up, the four of us took off and formed our paceline. I tried to keep in mind what our leader, Jim, told me, which was to take just 1 to 2 minute pulls and try and keep the same pace as when I took over the pull. I think I did pretty well in this when I was taking my pulls. I would still lose contact sometimes when I dropped back and was at the tail, but I got better at that as the paceline went on. This hard paceline section lasted about 54 minutes and while we averaged just .2% grade, there were some relatively short climbs maxing out at 8%. Our average speed was 21.8mph.

For the entire 73 mile ride, I averaged 19.7 mph, my highest average speed to date. It will be interesting to see how I do on this same route when I do my century in a week. Given the power output's I maintained, more on that below, I think I should be able to keep about the same average speed even without the paceline to help me. My power output will have to be more constant than it was on this ride, but is well within my abilities to do that.

So, after the ride was over I started trying to decide, was this a hard ride or wasn't it. In some ways it felt pretty hard. Maybe because of the less than steady pace, or just from the nerves of having to match pace with other people riding so close. It was hard to tell based on how my legs felt as I had after all done two days of intervals in the previous two days, a third day of intervals within the past 4 and add into that 2 longer rides totalling 129 miles in the two days before that. So if my legs were a bit sore after this ride, and they were a bit, it probably wasn't all due to this particular ride, but rather to the 700 or so in TSS score I had accumlated prior to this.

I was still undecided when I got home and downloaded from the PowerTap to get the 'real' story. A picture is worth a 1000 words they say, so this graph of my power output by training zone tells the tale. Nearly 46% of the riding time, or 1 hour 41 minutes, was spent in the active recovery power zone (<164W), and nearly 22% was spent in the endurance zone (165W-222W). So more than 2/3 of the ride was spent in relatively easy zones. In terms of average power, I only averaged 176W, some 20W less than on the 5 hour ride I did on Monday and nearly 100W less than I averaged on my hilly ride on Thursday (granted that was just over 98 minutes). Even normalized power, which I would have expected to be higher given all the surging, was less than it was on Monday. So in terms of power output, this really was an 'easy' ride. Even by heart rate, this wasn't a particularly difficult ride, with 60% of the time being in zones 1 or 2 (Friel zones) or endurance and recovery, with the bulk of that time being in recovery.