Week #3’s Goals are so important to safe, cooperative group riding that your SIG leaders have probably already been telling you about these for the last two weeks…but now that you’ll be at the front of the paceline – pulling, guiding, leading the group – they’re especially important.

Our Goals for Week #3 are:

• Ride In A Straight Line
• Keep Pedaling
• A Relaxed, Athletic Position
• Modulating Speed
• Anticipate; Ride Proactively
• Uniform, Consistent Effort

Anticipate; Ride Proactively – This means looking forward, both physically (into the distance, to see what’s happening well up the road in front of you) and temporally (being able to predict what will happen in the future based on input your senses receive now). It means planning how and where you will lead the group in advance of actually executing those moves.

When you’re the front rider in a paceline, you’re the Leader. Even if you’re only at the front of the line for a few seconds, you’re the Leader for those few seconds. When you’re the Leader you’re responsible for the whole group. You are the eyes of the entire group…because when you’re in the front, you have the best view of the road ahead. You’re responsible for guiding the group safely down the road, out of harm’s way, away from obstacles, towards the intended destination…and oh, yeah, at a pace that’s appropriate for the terrain, weather conditions, total remaining distance, and the group’s abilities.

This means that you cannot be riding reactively, where your choices are only informed by last-second responses to stimuli. Riding Proactively means you’re looking and planning ahead so that nothing takes you by surprise. Because surprise is the antithesis of smooth.

You need to Anticipate what’s going to happen up the road and gradually prepare the group in advance. Traffic lights may change as you approach, cars may cross or turn in front of you, potholes may spring out of nowhere (…well, actually, no, potholes don’t spring out of nowhere; they just seem to if you’re not looking up ahead, scanning for potential problems, Anticipating & Riding Proactively). You need to be leading the group while looking out for any and all potential interruptions to your smooth straight line so that you can make smooth gradual adjustments well in advance of any problems.

For example: See that traffic light turn yellow while you were still 100 yards away? We can all Anticipate that it will turn red very shortly. But towing a paceline of a dozen individuals is like driving a freight train; the locomotive sees the signals long before the caboose does. So Riding Proactively means you have to Anticipate that it may take longer to bring your paceline to a stop, and therefore you’ll want to start slowing sooner.

That seems pretty obvious, right? Now consider this variation:

You’re approaching a red light. The whole paceline has started to slow, because now everyone is Anticipating that you’ll all come to a stop. But before you reach the intersection, the light changes to green. What do you do?

Continue riding, right? Well…yes, but remember: Everyone was already Anticipating coming to a stop. Some of the riders may have already clipped out in preparation. And some of those riders are in the caboose! So you have toAnticipate that it may take a few seconds for everyone to realize that the line is not stopping, and adjust your pace accordingly. Don’t get back up to speed immediately once the light turns green; instead gradually, smoothly resume your cruising speed while giving everyone in line a chance to recognize that you’re continuing.

Negotiating obstacles (potholes, rough road, traffic, pedestrians, construction, anything that might prevent you from literally Riding In A Straight Line) requires that the front rider be vigilant enough to spot the obstacles well in advance, and then change the direction of the line – again, smoothly, gradually, calmly…almost unnoticeably – so that it skirts those obstacles. You don’t want to have to steer around (or worse, swerve around) obstacles; you want to have changed the trajectory of the line such that you simply don’t come too close to those obstacles at all. That requires spotting those obstacles in advance, Anticipating that you’ll need to avoid them, and making the adjustment subtly, safely, and smoothly. That’s Riding Proactively.

(for more on this subject, see the Avoiding Hazards section on page 4 of An Introduction to the 2013 A-SIG)

Uniform, Consistent Effort – this is the real meat of the rideSMART™ system. This is what sets the NYCC’s A-SIG style of cooperative group cycling apart from competitive group cycling (aka “hammerfests”) where the goal is to see how many riders you can drop/destroy/crush.  Our goal is to actually finish the ride with the same number of cyclists as we started with! And one of the most effective ways of Keeping The Group Together is to ride with a Uniform, Consistent Effort.

Note that I did not say Uniform, Consistent Speed. Effort refers to how hard your body is physically working. We want the amount of work you are doing – how much power you’re putting into the pedals, how hard your muscles are working, how hard you’re breathing, how high your heart rate is – to be more-or-less consistent over the duration of the ride, regardless of what kind of terrain you’re riding over.

This means (perhaps counter-intuitively) that you don’t want to be working really hard when climbing uphill, and you don’t want to be taking it easy chillaxin’ as the bike rolls downhill. You want to be putting out the same effort going uphill or downhill as you would when cruising on flat roads. This means you’ll actually be working pretty hard when going downhill, and taking it easy (relatively) when climbing uphill. For this reason, the colloquialism “Easy Up/Hard Down” is sometimes used in place of Uniform, Consistent Effort.  We’ll use those terms interchangeably.

To understand how “Easy Up/Hard Down” keeps a group of cyclists together over the course of a long ride over varying terrain, it helps to think about what happens when you don’t employ this technique:

• Imagine a hypothetical gang of testosterone-fueled hammerheads out for a long hilly Saturday ride. The group gets to an uphill section of road (could be a genuine Steep Climb, or even just a roller) and everyone puts on their Climbing Face and does whatever it is they do when climbing …and almost instantly the group shatters: The fast folk go hard, attacking, and wind up going off the front immediately (and some of them subsequently blow up halfway, to be passed by the more prudent climbers). The rest of the group feels compelled to chase (for fear of getting dropped), therefore either blowing themselves up or expending precious endurance that might’ve come in handy later in the ride. Perhaps some folks concede to their granny gear immediately and spin slowly but diligently all the way to the top…but in any event, the group has fallen apart; it is no longer a recognizable unit of cyclists, simply a bunch of people on bikes scattered along a hill.
• …and then on the descent (or the downside of the roller), where everyone figures “Now’s my chance to rest since I just blew myself up on that climb!” and they try to catch their breath and not expend too much effort, what happens? The plus-sized cyclists roll faster, the jockey-sized cyclists roll slower, and you either wind up squeezing your brakes for the entire descent, or else you bunch up and potentially run into the back of the cyclists who are relying on gravity to pull them down hill.

Neither scenario is ideal because neither allows you to maintain manageable spacing between riders in the group…and neither allows you to maintain a cohesive group, period.

Now look at what applying a Uniform, Consistent Effort does to a group when you encounter hills or rollers. As soon as the road tilts up – and this doesn’t just go for steep climbs, we could be talking about just a slight 1% or 2% grade change – you strive not to work harder but to work exactly as hard as you were before when the road was flat. Which means you’ll wind up going a little bit slower when the road tilts up. If it’s only a slight 1% or 2% grade change, you’ll probably only be going a very slight bit slower; if you come upon a 10% uphill, maintaining the same effort means you’ll be going a lot slower than you were on flat ground. But look at where the group is: Right behind you, still maintaining a tight, evenly-spaced paceline. Because no one is attacking the uphills. No one is blowing themselves up. They’re all simply maintaining the same effort they were when riding on flat ground.

And when the road tilts down and gravity gets you in its lovely grip, you want to continue maintaining that same effort. Now’s not the time to let up & relax, you want to keep putting power into your pedals, because everyone else behind you is also in gravity’s grip. The hardest you’ll ever work in a cooperative group ride is when you’re at the front of the paceline on a descent, because you practically need to outrun the riders behind you to prevent them from having to brake unnecessarily or run up your back wheel.  Yet if everyone in the line is putting out the same effort they were when riding on flat ground, there will be no bunching up on descents, and the even spacing and group cohesion of the paceline is maintained.

Applying the concept of Uniform, Consistent Effort requires a certain refined sensitivity to how your body feels; unless you ride with a power meter we’re not talking about a truly objective metric, we’re talking about perceived effort. You need to be able to perceive the tension in your leg muscles, the changes in your heartrate, and how your breathing is responding. For some riders this comes easily; for some, it can be elusive. And if you ever do get the opportunity to ride with a power meter, it can be a real eye-opener: You would be surprised at how hard you have to pedal while descending in order to maintain the same effort you were putting out while cruising on flat ground! Likewise, you’d be surprised at just how easy you have to climb to not exceed that baseline effort. “Easy Up/Hard Down” indeed!

This Saturday you’ll be taking your turn pulling at the front of the paceline. It’s a very different experience than being behind other riders, with lots more responsibilities. This week’s Goals will help you deal with all the sensory input going on in front of you, while remembering to ride for the benefit of the group of cyclists behind you.  So…

• Ride In A Straight Line
• Keep Pedaling
• A Relaxed, Athletic Position
• Modulating Speed
• Anticipate; Ride Proactively
• Uniform, Consistent Effort