Speed in paceline vs. solo ride

[Zen]

Look at it this way- your speed increased because you were drafting. If you can ride solo and only lose about 2mph i'd say thats not too bad

[li10up]

Look at it this way- your speed increased because you were drafting. If you can ride solo and only lose about 2mph i'd say thats not too bad

Thanks Zen...from the sounds of it we need to try to push it a bit more during our group rides. Although, we do go anywhere from 18 to 22 mph on the flat sections...still at the end of the ride the avg. speed shown on my computer is in the 16.5 mph range.

[pyxichick]

Well, since you're doing 20-30 percent less work while drafting than on your own, shouldn't the difference, if you're going as hard as you can in both situations, be 20-30 percent? I guess this only pertains to drafting, and not rotating to the front.

[Grog]

Pure speculation:

If I work my @$$ off really hard on my own, on very flat grounds, assuming no wind, I can manage to hold maybe 30 km/h (imagining a road with no obstacle) for about an hour.

If I work the same way but instead of being alone I'm holding to my boyfriend's wheel for my dear life, we achieve about 37-38 km/h on the same flat road with no obstacles. (He's working hard too, but not TERRIBLY hard. I, on the other hand, will need to eat a whole bear - rare, please - at the end of that hour, with a cold beer if possible! .) We've done that a couple of times.

So the 20-30% estimate is about right from my experience.

I read somewhere that there was some - minimal - positive effect for the person pulling at the front, something like 5-10%.

Now if it's a club ride, even if we're on a paceline, there's lots of variables to consider: who's there, how experienced they are, what terrain we're on, how chatty we are, how hard was the race the week before, etc. We rarely go more than 2-5 km/h faster than I would go on my own.