dsh, I will relay of what I'm unofficially capable of, and I ride within view of the ocean everyday, my 75 GI track bike can't run with my 12 speed road bike that has 81, 88 and 100 GI beyond a comparable GI speed that the track bike has. Many of today's road bikes are pushing 120 GI and with the legs to power that on a flat land run, there's no way I could pace that with roughly 65 % of that top end gear. Would it take even 10 minutes to forget I was even on the same road with both of us chugging away at full steam ? Over the 15 miles I do ride in a single direction, I've calculated that I've gotten the track bike to average around 20 mph, the road bike closer to 25 mph. Funny, we have those little speed reminders for the cars set up at the south end of Bal Harbor, FL, these will clock a cyclist if traffic is such that you are in the right spot and the only vehicle that it captures, but that has confirmed the range of speeds I achieve. Anyway, in an hour that's 5 miles difference, in 12 minutes, there's a mile (10 city blocks if the blocks are truly, roughly 1/10 of a mile each) difference in distance traveled. This is at the best I could do. We'd probably have to ask TejanoTrackie whether he could do it or has even tried comparing track vs road bike. I know when I got back into cycling, I sucked bad, but after a few weeks my times improved and then I hit a brick wall with that. I figure the training and cadence was optimal at that point. I think I'd get either a hernia or suffer a massive coronary and drop my nuts on the road to beat my best ? BTW, the fastest I could get the atb to go was around 15 mph or so on a flat land run. For certain & shorter distances it might not appear that bad but for 50+ miles ? If you could ride 2 solid hours at 25+ mph that's some pretty good conditioning for the average couch potato ?

The other thing too, this guys gonna want to stop and enjoy the scenery, maybe discover the area, pumping away at full steam for any bike type won't allow for that experience, the cyclist is too preoccupied with managing the ride. I know I have to literally manage my ride in shorter increments and familiar points of reference along the way. Manageable chunks of real estate with imaginary start and finish lines that blur into the next section of the ride.