caloso

And by the way, you're doing great.

Homebrew01

That will not make any significant difference, except for a few moments when going down the steepest hills if you are already pedalling at 130+ rpm. What you need is more experience & fitness.

(In addition to properly inflated tires, make sure your brakes are not rubbing the rim.)

If I put a 6-speed transmission in my Honda Accord (same engine), and put on some low profile tires, it will not make my car go faster.

banerjek

The limiting factor is you, not the transmission. To spin out your current gearing, you need to be going well over 40mph.

The best way to speed up is to get stronger. However, in your case, there is something you can do equipment wise that will noticeably speed you up -- swap out those big fat tires with a heavy tread for something much skinnier and slicker.

jmX

I'm a similar build, 165lbs 32years old, and started cycling about 8 months ago. As long as you are making progress, then that is all you need to know. I started at about 15.5mph average for 20-40mi, and now I'm about 19mph average for 20-40mi, 18mph for 40-60, and for centuries I'm all the way down to 16mph or so. Every person is different. We both obviously have a very long way before we're doing 5 hour centuries.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to reply is due to the people saying to ditch the bike computer and have fun. I'm in 100% opposition to that. For me, results are the goal, and results are fun. Without being able to quantitatively measure the results, the whole exercise loses its appeal to me. I didn't buy a bike to go smell the flowers alongside country roads, that's just a nice perk. I bought a bike to try and get fit, and to challenge and improve myself. That to me is fun.

Also, don't worry about pacelines blowing past you. Paceline mph and solo mph are simply in different realms. I'd just worry about yourself right now and keep at it.

Finally, a new bike will not make you faster. The 1.2 is fine for the type of rides you do and the speed you do them at. It really would be a waste of money....wait until you feel a lull in motivation in a year or two and then maybe consider a new bike to help rekindle your interest (or guilt you into training harder due to the money spent ).

Drew Eckhardt 

You want to be riding 5-6 days a week.

Current scientific thought is that fitness can be modeled as a decaying exponential average of daily intensity ^ 2 * duration over 42 days and fatigue as daily intensity ^ 2 * duration over a 7 day period with sustainable differences between fitness and fatigue. Time constants vary some with individuals.

When you're only riding a few days a week your daily average and therefore fitness will be low and you won't be physically capable of enough training load on your long days to overcome it.

Ride more and follow a training plan which incorporates rest days/weeks/months.

Consider training with power (used wired Powertaps are under $400 built into wheels and wireless ones start in the $600 range) or heart rate. It makes pacing and knowing when to dig deep or stop/recover from your efforts much simpler.

You might read _The Time Crunched Cyclist: Fit, Fast, and Powerful in 6 Hours a Week_ and _Training and Racing with a Power Meter_.

You need to work 70% harder to overcome aerodynamic drag at 20 MPH than 16 unless you 'cheat' either by riding in a paceline (where your effort can be 30% lower when you're not taking a turn pulling) or with aero-bars.

chibibike

i currently use a garmin 60c with a ram mount to hold it on my handlebars. would you recommend i get a more simple bike computer instead? maybe it's a good idea to keep the amount of things attached to my bike and weight down as much as possible? All I use my gps for is to look at my MPH and to see how far i've gone so it kinda does seem like a little much and I donno if I want to be able to ride as quickly as i can, should i take off my headlight, lock, ram mount/gps, and maybe the little pack on back of my saddle? all that together prolly weights at least 3-5lbs i think.... maybe a lil more.




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caloso

I don't think ditching your computer or saddle bag is going to have a noticeable effect on your speed. But training will -- does that Garmin read an HRM? If so, you can do a lot, just with heart rate training.

grwoolf

I'm pretty much programmed this way as well. If you like riding with a computer and seeing quantitative results, you would LOVE riding with a power meter.

Drew Eckhardt 

Nope. You need to ride harder. Psychologically that's easier when you're chasing some one but you have more opportunities to ride harder when by yourself. Some people also find it easier to push themselves on hills.

If you're an average or larger sized rider in a pace line where you're working to keep up you're going to get dropped on the first climb where you can't cheat by sitting on some one's wheel.

If you're in a group where you have to work hard but can keep up on the climbs, you're going to be soft pedaling in the pace line.

If you're smaller than your group you may not work hard except when pulling and you won't be doing much of that since your power to drag ratio is going to be a lot worse.

Riding solo you can go as hard as your fitness and discipline allow or as easy as your need for recovery dictates.

Group rides are fun but you'll get a better workout by yourself if you have the discipline to push hard and recover when appropriate.

StanSeven

Yeah. There's a huge century in Md that's completely flat and the pacelines are fast. Lots of people (strangers) gather at the start and rest stops for 300+ rider packs. They hang in for really fast paces and don't do anything but draft. They also stop their computers when the pace slows and starts at the stops. Then they brag about 20 mph pace is easy.

chibibike

it doesn't have read HRM. just the basic GPS stuff. I kind of don't like how big it is on my bike though. If i wanted to get something else for under 100 dollars, what would you recommend.

revchuck 

This is excellent advice. Some additional info...riding in a paceline is not an easily acquired skill, and requires a ton of trust in the folks in front of and behind you. This is why many cyclists are reticent about letting other people join their paceline. When you're half a bike length or less apart at 20+ mph, just touching your brakes can cause problems for people behind you, and weaving a little as you reach for your bottle can bring you into some else's line. If you touch your front wheel to someone's rear wheel, you're almost certainly headed for a close encounter of the asphalt kind, and will probably bring down cyclists behind you as well.

Having said that, it's a skill worth learning. If you can get into a group ride before they start, and explain that it's new to you, they'll be able to both give you pointers and watch out for weird moves on your part.

wkndwarrior

Good points, I can see how this requires a lot of trust between all the cyclists in a paceline. I'm still a bit awkward when I reach for that water bottle and I weave a little so that's another thing I got to work on.

ultraman6970

All newbies do the same comparison, "how he can and I can not," I have a good news and a bad news. The good news is that you are not abnormal and the bike is not the problem. The bad news is that to ride at 23 mph (37 km/h)average you have to train and have a lot of mileage in you body. You can't pretend to do it in a couple of days because that it wont going to happen. There are training plans, diets, care, invisible training, etc. You can go over 32 km/h (19 mph) using only 42x16 or 53x18 for example, that translates in a lot of cadence, cadence and power I'm sure you don't have. Some people mentioned pace line, I call it racing pace, w/o having the racing pace built pretty much will take longer to improve.

As for the bike, people has been doing 17 mph using tricycles loaded with potatoes in the back for years so the issue is not the bike, maybe fitting also but at the OP level definitely is not a bike problem. "the cripple blaming the cobblestones"??

RacerOne

It's really all about pain and how much you can stand.

Homebrew01

You're missing the point .... your LEGS & LUNGS determine how fast you go, not your saddle bag or light.

ColinJ

You are making good progress - keep it up!

But ...yes, you are still way off a 5 hour century ...

I've done a few 6 hour centuries, each having about 3,200 ft of ascent. It took quite a lot of effort to get down from 7 hours to 6, and it would take even more to get down from 6 hours to 5.

Don't obsess about your speed. Just keep riding and put in plenty of hard efforts, but also make sure you have easy or recovery days between them. I have a favourite hilly 25 mile loop and I used to go out once a week and try and beat my time on that. That kind of thing is a good way of motivating yourself to get faster, and of monitoring your progress.

lazerzxr

If you have 800 miles of training in under 3 months and have just done a century I am not at all surprised you have ITB pain. ITB problems dont heel easily once they take hold they just get worse. They are an over use injury caused by doing too much without enough training. Trust me, been there and done that. Unless you want a year off the bike doing physio and watching your mates enjoy their bikes I'd ease up a bit now. Two years after getting ITB trouble I still have issues and would love to go back and take it easy while I could.

No point making the distances sound good if the reality is that the training isn't there.

chibibike

I just took off my headlight, lock, and gps mount and it made my bike 5lbs lighter...

idoru2005

I respect your reply. Another thing I'd like to add, which is more general-fitness related, is you generally need to "switch things up" in order break out of fitness plateaus. If the OP has stagnated in his riding routine, it is much harder to make incremental gains.

So by joining a group, even though what Drew said is correct, the OP may still experience some gain in strength and performance by virtue of learning new techniques, ways to conserve energy, etc.

But yeah, I wholeheartedly agree that disciplined solo work will also make him stronger and faster.

banerjek

You'll probably be disappointed by how little difference that makes, but every bit helps.

Are those Bontrager Hardcases you're running for tires? If they are, replacing the tires with something lighter/sportier will make a small but noticeable difference while improving your ride (though you will get more flats).

clink83

You could argue that it would. That's not a good analogy, since you could increase the cars top speed or increase it's acceleration by changing the gear ratios.

Homebrew01

OK, I should have said it will not increase my car's power.
Maybe I should have added that removing the floor mats will not make my car noticebly faster.

clink83

But if you put a wing on it and a sweet body kit, thats +200hp brah!

caloso

Does the fork have a lock out? I bet that might help.