Audax rides

It bodes 'interestingly' for the 600 on Saturday.

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.

Is it a case then of firstly being able to complete the distance and then doing it in a faster time?

Sort of, but not directly.

For me it's about being able to complete the distance, the next things were/are:-

• Not being up against the time limits
  
• Doing it with more rest/sleep
  
• Doing hillier and hillier rides
  
• Doing more and more (longer/hillier) rides on fixed
  
  

Not being up against the time limits is related to speed but there's an early cut off with just how much faster you need to be to get this. Having 2 hours to do the 35km to a control before it closes is not relaxing; one puncture or mechanical and you could be out of time. Having 3 hours to do that distance makes it comfortable, having any more than that doesn't make it any more comfortable really. Once you're that little bit faster then it makes the rest of the ride more relaxing.

Of course, if you get round a 600km event with 8300m of climbing on fixed with 5 or 6 hours' sleep in the middle and a nice couple of hours to spare at the finish then you'll probably smash the next flat-ish 200km ride that you do on gears.

My goal is generally to finish any ride with about 2 hours time spare. This may change as I get fitter/faster as I train for slvlss.

I can't see the audax crowd wanting to race each other

Ha!

I was talking to Frank during the 400 and my explanation of previous audax scenery was "what scenery, all I see are potholes and powermeters". I'm a bit of an exception though, using these as training rides for TTs certainly isn't the norm.

To be fair, I did stop to take some photos during this weekend's audax so it's not always about training/racing.

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.

So for me "speed" varies.

For the 200km rides, I am sometimes interested in how quickly I can do the distance and sometimes just out for a chat.

For the longer rides it starts to be about "Wanting to get it done". I rarely enjoy the dark bit at the end of a ride (though I love actual night rides like the dynamo) and so am eager to get it done. The idea of spending a couple of hours dozing in a bus shelter holds zero appeal.

I am going a 600 in a couple of weeks. Through a planning clusterfuck I appear to have entries for both Beast from the East and Flatlands so I need to choose now and cancel one.

The scenery on Severn Across was beautiful. Some of the woods with carpets of bluebells were so, so lovely this weekend.

Passenger from the 400...

You are good with statistics aren't you, the factors here not riding to fast for my left knee, sleep, time on controls and finishing? Your help with my BCM schedule would be appreciated.

That's an actual Nexus phone-camera shot by an actual god-like Australian... ;)

Cool, I didn't know teenslain could take pictures like that.

He's about as Australian as I am German.

Shhh, don't blow his cover or they'll send him back over here!

@hippy does the helpers ride still count as BRM and allow you to qualify for PBP? A friend is stuck and is considering asking the organiser.

On the audax ride style front I prefer the ride hard between controls and break for a long time but have massive respect for the seasoned guys who can just knock out a steady pace all day with minimum stops.

Rode the Asparagus & Strawberrys 400 yesterday which was fantastic and was topped off with a 3am McD's in Colchester (which almost didn't serve me because I was using the drive through on a bike) and a hairy ride home along the A12.

Was also nice to meet Steve Abraham at the start line.

Yeah, that's what Mark said. It's so people doing route checks or handing out cuppas can still do their ride and qualify.

You are the rider on the Cannondale obviously? Hello again.

There was a chap on Severn Across at halfway with us wearing sandals. He must have been easily in his sixties and was just awesome, never stopped making progress and so got the job done.

@fussballclub Not me, black and white Merida with bushy legs but hello.

^ I've been refused in MacD's drive thru before. So I took the bike in the restaurant and ordered at the counter.

Oh I never thought of that, what an idiot.

It was 3am and the counter was closed otherwise I would have been sleeping in Mc Donalds.

Your help with my BCM schedule would be appreciated.

Ride to Menai, if you're feeling dozy then have a snooze on a table there, if it's still light then you're not going to have many problems. Stock up well (either at the control or I think there's a 24 hour garage somewhere near the bridge) on the way as there'll be fuck all open between leaving Dolgellau at ~200km and getting back there at ~400km.

Eat then snooze at Kings YH on the way back, leave with an hour to spare. Some big lumps at first on the way to Aberhafesp but it kind of flattens out. Final control at Weobley is a shop. Enjoy the Llancloudy roller-coaster.

Depends on what times you'd normally do for other rides and how you felt at the end of them.

Thanks for the answers to my question about speed. It's good to hear that you all have varying opinions on the subject and brings me back to why I started riding audax in the first place: that it's open to all types of riders. I've only stepped up to the 200km distance this year so I guess it's still early days for me and the fact that I'm even thinking about getting a bit faster suggests that I'm starting to get more comfortable with the distance. But I'm finding hard to imagine how I could go much faster than I do at the moment.

I go at a pace that feels comfortable to me which I perceive as not too easy and not too hard. Whenever I push the pace I have found that I get burned out later on. But these peaks of speed only fractionally add to the overall average speed. Aside from doing interval training or hill repeats which isn't a regime I want to add to my routine I can't really see how I would get any faster. Without doing any kind of specific speed training will it just happen by riding longer distances?

Perhaps it's just something that I thought about on this particular ride and I'll forget about it on the next one and focus on the scenery again.

Bigger gear

For me the biggest impact on audax time is the stops, and probably the small, unscheduled stops more than anything else. My speed while riding depends completely on who I am with, on my own I enjoy pushing on, in a group I like to chat. I was a bit slower than I would have ideally have liked at the weekend because my partner was under par and hated any climb, dropping to 10kmh or so, which again has a big impact on average speeds.

I generally ride at a pace that means I could happily carry on and on even after the ride has finished. Irrespective of the distance of the ride.

In other words, I'll tend to ride the first 100km of an Audax at the same speed regardless of the overall ride length (whether it's just 100km or some stupid 1000km+ ride).

Obviously there are some rides where I have to push it because it's very hilly, the weather is crap (constant headwind), I'm on fixed or, more likely, all of those things. At the end of those rides I'm unlikely to want to even see my bike again and slumping on a floor is all that I'm good for.

Many others approach it differently and judge the ride well so that they're a lot more spent at the end of it. Sure, they're generally faster/fitter anyway, but I've seen people at the end of a 300 who could barely consider doing another 20km whilst I got back on my bike and did another 100km to get home.

The more rides you do, the more you get to understand how your body reacts to all this stuff. You also stop less frequently (between controls) and take less time at controls, which all makes for a faster ride without riding faster. Eating on the bike between controls so that stops are just a rest, refill and a restock rather than waiting for slow service in a cafe. You've noticed this, to an effect, with your 300. Most people do their fastest 200 on a 300 as the controls are less frequent and the focus is on the bigger distance.

The more cycling you do the faster you'll get too, even if the improvements are slower than targeted training. Audaxes are rarely just all plodding along at the same pace. Hills, headwind, etc make for varied intensities required == not just hours of Zone 2 training.

I'm not massively experienced at longer distances; I've only done 3 rides ever of 200km or more, but just some observations from Sunday's Hop Garden 200.

Since I've recently been riding with my club and pushed my way into pace group 2 of 4. I've been able to ride much faster over shorter distances (c.85-100km) than ever before. I reckon I could comfortably do a flattish 100k audax in four hours now, with no significant stops, so I was looking at doing 200 on Sunday in 10 hours.

Anyway for a number of reasons me and my mate found ourselves at the cutoff limit everywhere in the fist half on Sunday, which was probably due to us stopping a fair bit and a couple of mechanicals*. Plus we got stuck behind a horsebox for ages at 7mph.

We left the lunch control 5 minutes after the cutoff time and I was getting a little bit worried to be honest.

Anyway, by the three-quarter-ish control point, we'd managed to claw back 1h10m somehow, and lots of that was into a headwind.

We did the whole thing in about 12h dead, with 1h30m to spare. If it was up to me we would have gone faster with fewer stops but I'd rather have the company and get round in one piece.

Well, this is slightly rambling and boring.

Signing off now.

/* for the first time ever I snapped a chain. Magic link just failed spectacularly and neither of us had a spare. I was about to pop a link out and join the chain with my chaintool when a non-audaxer bloke rides past.

"Are you alright lads?"

"Erm, you haven't got a magic link have you?"

"Let me see...will this do you?"

Saved me a lot of bother! Lesson learnt there.

I'm not sure why the link failed. I reckon it's had less than 1000km on it.