Originally Posted by
slyjackson
NO I just know that a person that just started riding that only rides 75 miles a week, without any previous riding experience will not be able to maintain a riding speed high enough plus keep a decent pace up hills and rollers for 50 miles to end with a 17 something mph average.
You are a funny guy... you
know this how?
Originally Posted by
slyjackson
With a 71 candence I'm surprised that you can even go twenty miles. You must be riding on pancake flat roads. Come to my area in MD with 6-7% grade hills on our "A" 54 mile route. I Guarantee you and your 71 rpm candence will be calling for the sag wagon. by the way, my best with 6 of these 6% grade hills on a 54 mile route gave me a 19.4 average and the faster guys were in the 20 something range and that was done this weekend.
You're kidding right? I live in California, we have
plenty of hills. That
Average cadence included non-pedaling time, it was just total revolutions / total time, so it will be much lower than "typical" cadence. Here is the cadence distribution from my ride Sunday. Average cadence was 77. 20% was 0, but otherwise a reasonable distribution centered around 80-85.
This route is one of the flatter coastal routes in the area, and including my solo warmup and group cooldown, and subsequent cruise to the coffee shop and home, the average was 19.1. The fast 20 mile "race" portion of the ride averaged 24.5mph and had about 1,500 feet of elevation gain, including a 10% section and a few sections averaging over 5%. My warmup was in the foothills and included many 6-8% sections. Oh yeah, I had a headache the night before and in the morning but took some tylenol and it went away. When I got home I had a headache again and later developed a full blown fever, so I was pretty much sick the whole ride.
Originally Posted by
slyjackson
By the way you do realise that I rode the entire 54 mile route at 20-23 plus mph
except for on the hills, So why would I be jealous of a 17 mph average?
Except for
on the hills is kind of an important part. Anyway, this isn't a pissing contest of which of us is faster, because without a race it would be pretty much impossible to determine. The point is that without knowing the fitness and background of the rider, it is impossible to say that someone cannot come into cycling and ride at 17mph for 50 miles "right away". Anyone who is reasonably fit can come in and be doing those modest speeds and distances easily within a few weeks. In this case the OP had a mtb background so he wasn't even new to cycling at all. But take a runner, or any other athlete from another sport and put them on a bike and likely within a month (possibly
well within a month) they will be able to accomplish that.