You are reading a single comment by @graunch and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
-
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.
graunch
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.