I'm lucky enough to have a bike path under a mile from my house, one that goes out to scenic Stone Mountain. You could say I really enjoy my rides now. I ride a recumbent and the lady rides a touring bike. As far as average speed is concerned we're relatively slow.

Being that our location attracts cyclists are people off all sorts, you can bet there's active cycling groups in the area. There's a particular one that coincides with our after-5pm rides. A rather large pack of roadies. The serious folks evidently as anyone going under 20mph at any point in the ride would get dropped. There's somewhere between 50-100 of them depending on the day. Big group.

Every time we ride we encounter this group. I haven't figured out their route yet but we try to avoid them. No luck - they have always somehow ended up approahing us from behind.

Now, these folks ride fast and there's a lot of them. They sound like a pack of marauding vikings and look like it in the rear view mirror. And here were are ahead of them in the street essentially piddlywinking along from their perspective.

What do we do?

We have been forced to stop or divert our route every time. The lady is a complete novice and she is in training, learning to ride in traffic and still nervous about it. And although I have a lot more experience I must admit I'm stumped by this as I've never ridden in a large group and somehow never encountered one while riding. The one time we tried to stay on our course, the roadies began overtaking us the same way they ride in their group: 2" or less away from us and at double our speed. She gets spooked and gets the nervous wobble going and then I get really scared there's going to be a pile-up on both of us. We pulled out of the road and let them pass. I know they aren't intentionally intimidating but the difference in pace and their style of riding makes it so.

We all have a right to the road, blah blah. But, what's the etiquette for a scenario involving slowpokes with a group of high-speed roadies approaches from the rear? We don't want to stop or change routes whenever these folks come by. And I don't want to give the lady the impression that more bikes in a pack = greater rights of way. Please educate us on the proper way to co-exist on the streets so we don't wipe out 50 Atlanta area cyclists at once. Thanks!