Don Gwinn

Like most things, it probably depends on your purpose. If you're only out to enjoy the ride, it's irrelevant. But if you're riding partly because you want to increase your cardio fitness, endurance, etc., then progression is important, and smaller increments of progression are more relevant.

Think of weightlifting. If you want to lift heavy objects just for the sheer physical thrill of lifting heavy things, then lifting natural stones and logs is hard to beat. They look cool, you look and feel like some kind of reborn avatar of Beowulf when you bring one up, and they're challenging because they're so irregular. But if you want to start lifting today and be a great deal stronger a year or two down the road, most people will get better results by lifting consistently and increasing the load by small increments so that progression can be smooth and consistent as well. That's why almost every gym has barbell plates as small as 2.5 pounds, and the better ones have even smaller plates that weigh one pound, half a pound or a quarter of a pound. Not because it's of key importance to know at all times that you're lifting half a pound more than the guy next to you, but because it's important to be able to increase your load from the same workout last week even if you can only increase it by half a pound. That's how you create progression.

Similarly, I imagine people use cadence meters (after all that long-winded bloviating, I reveal that I don't have one) to try to beat earlier performances even if they can only "beat themselves" by such small increments of cadence that they couldn't detect the difference by feel. Certainly I use the cadence and the resistance settings on elliptical trainers at the gym to do the same thing. And speaking of that . . . it's actually time to go hit the gym.