stapfam

I ride in a group, a couple of whom are competitive, and to be quite honest, when they do not turn up for a ride, I do not miss them. Forget the competitive riders and you still have different capabilities and fitness levels with riders within a group. We have one rule in our group and that is you ride at your level, your pace and your abilities. Going uphill off road we lose the competitive riders into the distance. The slower riders just say "see you at the top" and everyone goes at their level. If we have a rider that is suffering someone will drop back to him, but at the top of the hill we all regroup. This is where the competitive fit riders let us know how slow we are and that is why I would rather be without them. I am not out for a race- Ok I'm out for a good workout, and the good feeling that comes from sweating buckets and conquering that track and hill AGAIN. But I can no longer compete on the speed stakes.

Only thing is, there is always somewhere that the competitive ones let themselves down, and if they get that annoying, we will throw in the "Extra" hill, or the 10 mile extra loop, or that particularly nasty downhill that they do not like. If they get really annoying, we just tell them that we are Taking the Tandem next week, and we are doing a 65 miler so bring the packed lunch. For some reason, we have a trouble free ride that week. Usually without them.

I do ride the Tandem out on the hills and this thing is fast- None of our group can stay with it, and riding the Tandem with the solos does not give the Tandem riders a good ride. For that reason, we go out on our own in the evenings and do our fast competitive riding over 25 miles on our own. If we do go out with the solos, The competitive edge disappears completely from the whole group and we all settle down into a decent paced ride.