Originally Posted by goenrdoug

The thing is, once you're doing an activity with others that has a potential for injury, everyone needs to be able to communicate quickly and easily, so, yeah, there are hand signals and convention to learn with group riding (some groups only pass on the left, others only pass on the rights. Some have rules about who pulls, how long, etc.) A lot of it comes with familiarity with one-another. If you ride with the same group for years, you're going to know whether Richard is prone to throw his bike backwards when he stands up or not, and you'll ride behind him accordingly.

The same thing would happen to you if you showed up at a regular weekend soccer game at the local park -- the kind where the participants are all adults, wear cleats and maybe even matching jerseys, but it's otherwise not 'sanctioned' or organized by any sporting body. Sure, you could play, but your chuck taylors and coveralls are going to be out of place and might even get some dubious looks.

The point is, it's not about you and it's not about your adherence to (or not) the various established conventions and traditions. Most of those are there for a reason -- you just aren't aware of them yet. You might see no reason to wear bib shorts or slurp an energy gel packet or carry salt tablets or signal that there's a small pinecone on the road or whatever, but if you continue riding with groups who go hard/fast/long, you will eventually recognize a need to have some additional padding on your sit bones, some sugar in your depleted system right now because you know the big climb of the ride is coming up at mile 58 and you've been on the egde of your abilities just keeping up with these bastards for the last 45 minutes and forgot to eat anything and now you're behind the eight-ball, nutrition-wise and you know that if you don't slurp that gel, you're gonna fall completely apart on the climb and spend the next hour just turning the pedals over in a haze by yourself and limping back to the parking lot alone only to drive home, shower and spend the night getting the spins every time you stand up.

So, you know, adulting is hard.. One of the things you learn early is to not mock that which you don't understand. It's a lesson that applies here. I suggest that you give it a chance and consider that maybe these guys know some things you don't (yet) know and maybe these behaviors you've noticed might simply be part of the whole thing -- like scratching and spitting are with baseball.