• Races vs. Group Rides. First and foremost, it’s important to understand that group rides are not races. Alot of time we will hear them referred to as “race rides”, but they do not have an official start and finish line, riders don’t pay to enter and there are no prizes. And most importantly, there are no official categories. You can have many different levels from professionals to Cat 5’s, as well as a wide range of ages all riding together. Commonly, lower level riders get pushed to their limits early in the ride, and then get dropped from the group.


• Opportunities. Group rides do offer lower category and masters racers an opportunity to see first hand how a top level cyclist performs on the bike and gives them a chance to learn from more experienced/stronger riders. It can also give you a direct experience with top level riders that cannot be gotten merely from watching them race. This was especially useful for me when I began competing here in the Sacramento, CA. area. We have a long-standing ride called the River Ride that has been going on since the 1970’s. The ride would consistently have some of the best riders in the country attend either because they lived here or were visiting the area. Being able to directly watch and ask questions of them was invaluable. I still utilize a lot of what I learned on those rides today with the athletes I work with at camps and in my coaching.


• Harder is not better. When training for peak performances during the the year and especially during the winter months, athletes must have a balanced program and specific plans to improve and achieve their goals. One of the most important ingredients in your program should be working on improving your aerobic capacity, which is your ability to deliver and utilize oxygen and ultimately produce more wattage at threshold. This process requires an immense amount of work, dedication and time, and is done largely at a medium level of exertion or under your threshold intensity. Doing too many group rides can take away from working on this all-important ingredient, because group ride pace is generally either too easy, or too hard (and usually both during the course of a given ride.) This “extreme” aspect of group rides can interfere with you doing the sub-threshold work that is so critical towards developing your aerobic capacity, especially during the winter months.


• Using discipline during group rides. As we have noted, working on aerobic capacity is a vital component of a balanced training program. When taking part in a group ride in the hills, try this valuable tip. As the group approaches a climb, slowly increase your pace and allow the group’s speed to take you to the proper intensity level (around your anaerobic threshold). At that point, pretend you are on the hill by yourself and ride the hill at the intensity that best benefits you at that time of the season. In other words, don’t let the group’s pace destroy you! This requires discipline, because it’s easy to want to go harder and harder. As that time approaches when you need to get into your own rhythm, think about the fact that this is ONLY training and you want to save your big efforts for when it counts during real races. This leads us to the next important point.


• Bike racing requires an athlete to give 100% during races. We’ve all been in suffering mode and know that to do well in the sport requires tolerating a lot of pain for periods of time. Another potential problem with doing too many group rides is that all the suffering becomes a blur. You suffer during the week a couple times; you suffer during the weekends on group rides or races. Your race efforts don’t become “special”, when you are motivated to give 100% towards winning.


• Bridging the gap from training to racing. Group rides don’t allow you to gauge what you are capable of accomplishing in a race, mainly because of having different levels of riders and not being a true race situation (i.e. traffic lights, stop signs and regroups.) One of the most important aspects of being successful in bike racing is each athlete truly understanding what their bodies are capable of doing, both physically and mentally, at any given time or situation. A good training program will allow you to link both physical and mental capabilities to your race efforts. One of the greatest things a coach likes to hear is one of their athlete’s come back from a successful race effort and say that something they were able to accomplish in the races “was just like all those efforts we did on that specific hill in training.”


• It’s all about improvement. A good training program allows you to track improvement, which because of the nature of group rides, is very difficult to do. With the popularity of power meters and software to track performance, athletes can readily track progress when they do a structured workout. Since group rides vary so much from time to time (because of the random nature of who shows up on a ride), it is much harder (although still possible) to understand whether you’re improving over time. I like my athletes to have two different sets of goals; one that addresses improvement in training in the form of increasing their watts per kilo at threshold, and the other to have realistic competition goals. They are separate entities that eventually link together and are dependent on each other.