• Ride In A Straight Line
• Keep Pedaling
• A Relaxed, Athletic Position
• Modulating Speed

Note the additive/cumulative nature of the Weekly Goals: You are still responsible for (not just knowing but putting into practice) all the previous weeks’ Goals as well as this week’s Goals.

And, just in case this isn’t apparent: That goes for everything your Leaders demonstrate, describe, or otherwise impart during the SIG rides, not just the written “Goals” from these emails. The cumulative nature of the curriculum is the key to its success; try to absorb everything so that it becomes second-nature, because many upcoming skills, techniques, or strategies rely on behaviors developed in the early rides.

So, what do we mean by A Relaxed, Athletic Position? If you ever played on the high school tennis (or basketball, football, wrestling, badminton, etc.) team you probably remember your coach talking about “The Ready Position”. It’s a neutral body stance that is balanced, loose, but poised to move in any direction or respond to input from any of the senses.

Legs and arms should be bent, not straight. Primarily this is so your joints can act as shock absorbers. Bent knees, even at the bottom of the pedal stroke, allow you to hover over the saddle when riding over rough pavement, isolating your tender bits from unnecessary abuse. Bent elbows prevent every bump and jolt through the front wheel/fork/bars from being transmitted directly into your neck and shoulders. Ouch!

Besides acting as shock absorbers (the primary advantage), bent elbows serve three other very useful purposes:

• Bending your elbows brings your head & torso closer to the ground; this makes you more aerodynamic (able to cut through the wind with less effort), and it lowers your center of gravity, which can provide stability during technical descents.
• During heavy efforts when you’re pulling hard on the bars – e.g., climbing, sprinting – having bent elbows causes your body to recruit the larger, more powerful muscles of the back (latissimus dorsi, I think). Pulling on the bars with straight arms would force your body to rely on the smaller, weaker muscles of the upper shoulders & neck (trapezius?), which would be less efficient and more fatiguing. (I’m going to defer to the resident physicians and exercise physiologists on the A-SIG faculty for the exact muscle nomenclature.)
• Bending your elbows makes you less susceptible to losing control of the bike when subjected to a minor side bump -- which we’ll talk about more when we get into Double-Rotating Pacelines. Basically the bent elbow allows your arm to “float”, hinging forward or backwards when bumped from the side without imparting any movement onto the bike’s handlebars. A similarly benign bump can cause you to inadvertently steer or counter-steer if the arms are straight, especially if elbows are locked.

Lots of good reasons to keep your elbows bent!

Excessive body motion can be very inefficient. A bobbing head and shoulders are robbing your body of energy that could otherwise be going towards propelling the bike forward. We want a still, quiet upper body; the more stable & planted your core, the more power you’ll be able to generate from your legs.

Another aspect of a Relaxed, Athletic Body Position is the head, and specifically the eyes. Where should you be looking? Where you want to go, of course! But the corollary to that statement is one of the fascinating facts about bicycle physics: The Bike Goes Where You Look. Look straight ahead, and the bike goes straight ahead. Look at that pretty flower growing out of the curb, and notice how your bike drifts towards the curb. When going around a corner, look in the direction you want to exit, not the direction you were going when entering the turn. Most importantly: The faster you are going, the farther ahead you need to look.

So: a neutral, ready position, with bent arms/legs, a still upper body, looking ahead… the Relaxed, Athletic Body Position we’re striving for will allow you to ride more efficiently and more comfortably while being better able to respond effectively.

Further reading on this – a consolidated version, actually – is included in the first three sections of the Curriculum document I sent you last week. For some real fun, Google “ready position” and discover how universally applicable this body position is to nearly every sport.

Modulating Speed refers to the techniques we use to Ride In A Straight Line very close to one another without allowing gaps to continually open & close in front of or behind us, and without crashing into one another. It’s the way we all ride together, as a group, rather than as a bunch of cyclists who just happen to be going in the same direction. We modulate our speed in order to maintain a consistent spacing between the other cyclists in the paceline. This means that individually we may have to go a little faster, or a little slower, without causing the paceline as a whole to speed up or slow down.

There are four techniques to slowing within the line:

• Feathering your brakes. More specifically, riding through your brakes. This is where the Keep Pedaling mantra becomes important: “Riding through your brakes” means that you continue pedaling, continue applying pressure to the drivetrain, while you gently squeeze the rear brake just enough to scrub off some speed. Emphasis on the word “gently”. You don’t want the bike to suddenly or even conspicuously go slower, you just want it to imperceptibly go less fast. And you don’t want to convey “I’m slowing down now!” to the rider behind you if you’re Modulating Speed just to maintain your spacing in the paceline, which is why you Keep Pedaling as you’re applying the rear brake.
• Shift to an easier gear. All else being equal, if you shift to an easier gear, you’ll go slightly slower. These days we have a luxury that even pro cyclists 25 years ago could only dream of: 9, 10, and 11 cogs on our rear wheels. One click up or down with the rear derailleur allows you to fine tune your speed to a degree that would have been considered splitting hairs in the 1979 Tour de France; use these micro-shifts to make very slight adjustments to your speed. Starting to creep up on the wheel in front of you? Go one click up the cassette to an easier gear.
• Soft pedaling. This is when you Keep Pedaling but you’ve eased up on the power that you’re putting to the pedals. Discreet soft pedaling is an acquired skill, because many cyclists’ tendency is to slow their cadence drastically when easing up on the power…and that’s almost as much of a red flag as not pedaling at all. (Almost.) You want your cadence to remain as close as possible to where it was, just with less force applied through your legs. It helps to combine soft pedaling with downshifting to an easier gear.
• Catching some wind. We generally don’t advocate pulling out of the line (offset to the side) because that’s a direct contradiction of the Ride In A Straight Line goal. Sometimes however it is the quickest way to scrub off a little speed, because you immediately lose the aerodynamic advantage of the paceline. Use this technique very judiciously. But you can catch some wind without moving to the side, just by sitting more upright, and you might be surprised at how much speed you can scrub off just by popping your head up a few inches.  Note that if you sit too upright you’ll be violating the “keep your elbows bent” advice from above…hey, nobody said this was gonna be easy! :)

Techniques for speeding up within the line are fewer, and mostly variations on the techniques for slowing within the line: Shift into a harder gear (and maintain the same cadence), or get more aero (i.e., lower your head & torso and tuck in tight behind the rider in front of you).

To reiterate: Modulating Speed, whether going faster or slower, is a technique to allow the individuals in the group to maintain their spacing. It’s used to prevent gapping or bunching up, not as a way for the group as a whole to go faster or slower.

I’ve grossly exceeded this week’s word allotment, so in summary:

• Ride In A Straight Line
• Keep Pedaling
• A Relaxed, Athletic Position
• Modulating Speed