A few years ago I made a mental adjustment and went from thinking of my solo rides as "recreational" to "training." Once I did that I steadily gained improvement in my cycling skills. Any bike ride is fun, so changing my thinking to a bike ride being for training never lessened my enjoyment of the ride.

There are no cycling clubs in my rural county. However I now belong to two training groups, a local all-female group that rides once a week, and a charity group of diverse cyclists that rides on another day of the week. Both groups are beneficial for me. The members of the female group are faster than me, and I am generally riding tired anyway, so I have a good workout trying to stay on the end of the paceline, then trying to keep them in sight. The charity group is beneficial because the rides are in different areas, which exposes me to different terrain and different climbs, plus I love getting to meet such nice people. When a group training ride is over, if the weather permits, I will often go do another ride to get in the additional miles or climb more hills, and sometimes will have a group member or two join me.

The biggest change in me is that I no longer like the recreational rides with other people. I am not particularly fast, but I find it hard to bike with others when on each ride I have to wait to do a re-group, and I wait and wait and wait until they finally catch up to me. Or the other cyclists have a need to stop at every rural grocery store we run across to stuff thousands of calories of high sodium high fat food into their mouths, while I wait and wait and wait. Or a ride becomes even more about food and it has to be a trek to a restaurant in a farm town 30 miles away, and I don't digest a complete meal well while cycling so a long stop at a restaurant isn't beneficial for me.

I still do recreational rides a few times a month, but by myself, and it is when I go to have fun riding on the paved trails. Can't train that way because of the other users on the trails, but cycling on a trail is a lot of fun, so I will keep on doing it.

To summarize, thumbs up on the training rides, either with a group or solo.