in situations where I wind up following someone who is marginally slower than me and too fast to pass easily I have found it useful to upshift and get up off the saddle to jump past them and then settle back down to the gear I was in and resume my ride.

If you're having this problem, you're not going fast enough.

And if you're not going fast and someone is drafting you... then you must have a nice butt.

edit: one thing I've noticed since I started doing training/intervals is sometimes the timing of said interval can be awkward. Say I'm finishing up a 5-minute thrust with a sprint, and just happen to shoot by someone, then sit up and drink.

Or about to start an interval, so I'm going slow, and get passed. Then it's time to start said interval and end up chasing/passing whoever that just passed me. I just try to block others out, gotta focus.

Hmm, drafting off her would be problematic...too squirrely.

Or you're the size of a truck.
I'm not very fast, but all the randos wanna ride my wake.

I like my women squirrely :P never did like the mousey ones

Did anyone else notice that her saddle was too high, causing her hips to rock back and forth. Knee pain will follow soon.

yes! you can ell cuz her hips are rocking

Who Really cares, Life is short just ENJOY the ride.

Now this is annoying...

http://hphotos-snc3.fbcdn.net/hs454...._3650583_n.jpg

i think you need to expect wheelsuckers in crowded conditions. better a wheelsucker than an impatient motorist riding your wheel laying on the horn though.

15th has less wheelsuckers if myrtle edwards is intolerable. and the riding is not too bad now with the bus bike and rto lanes.... before it was a speedway, and no lane feels safely wide enough when the traffics doing 50! just tolerable. wheelsuckers on the shorepath is pleasant compared to how 15th used to be.

He's trying to push the bike to 88 mph.

Back to topic at hand. I hate when strangers draft off me. They could be experienced racers, or total posers with enough money to buy a nice road bike to impress friends with. The former is okay, the latter better stay away from my wheel. Trouble is I don't know which is which until the poser reveals himself by crashing into me. I had them draft me and their bike handling skills were scary to put it mildly.

Besides they don't let us draft in Ironmans. I'm supposed to ride alone.

Good point. I ride to work down 15th in the morning and it's pretty sweet: next to no buses and surprisingly few bikes and it saves me about 5 minutes. The Myrtle Edwards part is on the way home when there's no clock to punch. I might try 15th going home this week.

If the guy/gal drafting you makes contact with your rear wheel, s/he's going down, not you.

You go ahead and keep believing that.

One of the worst accidents I've been in was during a race when a guy drafting me misjudged how I was going to take a turn. He clipped my rear wheel and we both went down at 20+ mph; unfortunately, me harder than him. An ambulance ride and 5 hours of ER docs putting my collarbone, arm and a few ribs back together says that if you get tagged just right, you're not staying up.

OK, I stand corrected.

Bet he tried to cut the turn inside you, sliding out and took you with him. That is different than the wheel touch most here are taking about.

:thumb:
Pretty close. He cut inside of me as we were heading into the turn and ended up with his front spokes around my rear derailleur. More 'flying' than sliding, until I hit the ground after going over the bars.

I've been wary of wheelsuckers ever since.

Twenty-five years ago I commuted between Davis, CA and Sacramento. One night my wife headed out from Davis to meet me on the bike path on the way home. She turned around and drafted "me" when "we" crossed paths. After a mile or so, the person she was drafting turned around and asked, "Are you lost?". Who would have thought there were two large men who had similar lighting systems (generator red and battery flashing amber rear and two headlights) on the same route at the same time? I guess this is not quite on-topic, since she really thought she had permission, but it gave us a good laugh at the time. Unfortunately, I never did see my twin on any occasion even though I bike-commuted there four days per week for many years.

^^^
Good thing there was no BFs back then. Otherwise the guy would have started flaming her as soon as he could get the computer started up.

If you don't know how to ride a pace line then maybe take up bowling...

Huh?

Not all of us are racer types. My road cycling is primarily commuting to/from work. I have zero interest in pacelining. So why would I need to know how to ride in one? Why would I even want to?

Put down the Shot Blox and step away from your PowerTap. We're talking about someone snagging an uninvited draft during a commute, not a Cat4 race.
We're lucky around here when half the people out on the regular commuter routes understand what it means when someone calls out "on your left", much less having any comprehension of paceline etiqutte. Heck, I understand pacelining just fine, but I don't want some potentially squirrely wheelsucker who saw a group of pros on the Versus Network over the weekend, thinking it's a good idea to sit six inches off my fender while tottering back and forth on his brand new, maladjusted aerobars. (See my previous comments in this thread as to why.)

Or maybe I can just shorten all that down to a similarly trollish one line retort:
"If you can't handle the headwind, GTF Off my wheel and HTFU."

HAHAHAHA!!!!

Son, did you ever swim 2.4 miles, ride 112, and then run a 26.2 mile marathon?

We don't paceline and don't know how to.

Shut up.