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My experience from the 300 and 400 this year.
The fastest rider is on fixed, a lovely bloke and has placed high in a national 24h TT. See him in the morning and at the pub after the ride. The really fast audaxers ride old Bob Jacksons at speed between long time in controls, where I catch up with them and drink copious amounts of beer at the pub in the evening (last time I see them) before what I would think hammering home.
There is a 20mph moving speed rider (lovely chap, on here) overtook me numerous times, when asked what he was doing he said texting, before he decides to ride straight to his van for a nap.
Really enjoyed that wide variety of PBP qualifying number of starters allowed for round the clock company even in the very later slogging stages of the 400.
As to racing, won a race when I ditched a few very fast roadies that had flown past earlier but seemed very exhausted in the later stages of the race.
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fussballclub
OK. So the speed question. I'd really like to know all of your thoughts and opinions on this.
It hasn't really concerned me before but yesterday during the Hop Garden I rode with a cold and I was going a bit slower than usual perhaps but it was bothering me. I'm fairly content to complete the distance and be inside the maximum time allocated for the event but having completed 200km in 8.5 hours as part of the Green and Yellow fields 300 ride and hearing how some of you are managing to complete them in shorter times and then going on to wonder how you could complete them in an even faster time these thoughts niggled at me yesterday.
To discourage racing audax has a maximum speed so I imagine that those of us who do want to improve their times want to get as close to that speed as possible without getting any faster. I can't see the audax crowd wanting to race each other as the objective is to enjoy the scenery and build up serious mileage and eat nice cake of course! Increasing speed then is more akin to time trailing rather than racing. Are we closet time trialists?
Is it a case then of firstly being able to complete the distance and then doing it in a faster time? Then of course proving ourselves in various other conditions such as wind, rain, heat and bad roads. There are always bad roads during some part of the ride.
I've been enjoying audaxing so far without speed being a factor and would quite like to keep it that way but now that I've started thinking about it I need some more points of view. Please help.