So you'll find a lot of advice on forums about riding in groups and there's a lot of discussion about how you do this and why you do this.

Just to consider why: when you are riding (without tri-bars), at a reasonable pace, you have to push through about 100 kilograms of air for every hundred and fifty meters, so that is several tons of air that you have to push through per day. So it's no wonder we get a little bit tired.

But if you ride together as a group, riding behind somebody, say 1 or 2 meters, you can save up to 30 percent of your energy. 30 percent, think about that for a few moments....it is like making each ride only 2/3rds of the distance....okay I am simplifying it much more that it is, but you get the idea.

And that's the idea of why you ride together in a group......more

So the poor guy in the picture here is falling off because he was going up a hill which started to ramp up unexpectedly, and he was in the wrong gear.

Realising this too late, he tried to change from the big ring at the front to the small ring, but chains don’t like to move sidewards when under huge amounts of stress; because the change in ratio from your big ring to your small ring is quite a large step, in this case the chain did not engage with the small ring and was flung off. With no chain he had no control or ability to turn the pedals and so hit the deck, more of a unexpected dismount than a fall, perhaps a cut knee and bruised ego. It could have been worse, he could have snapped the chain, which would take a while to get repaired or replaced.

aka The Power and The Grace

One of the strange things that we have in cycling is that it is rare to be taught to pedal, unless we've been coached or have been schooled within a good cycling club.

Quite often we see that people have very poor technique, and is easy to observe by looking to see if they are stamping on the downstroke, which not only is jarring their legs, but wasting huge amounts of energy for little return. You will not only spend longer days in the saddle, but will fatigue your muscles, and put unnecessary strain on your knees. Expect to be spending somewhere in the region of five to nine hours riding inn endurance event, so the more efficient you can make the rotation of the cranks the more power you can put through the back wheel the easier it's going to be.

We are going to break down pedaling into four phase, the top of the stroke (we will call this the setup phase), the downward (or power) stroke, the bottom of the stroke (called the pull back phase) and the upstroke (the lift phase).

As a reminder perhaps to even the more seasoned cyclists amongst you, as as espoused by Joel Friel of Trainingpeaks, there are only three things that you need to improve as part of your preparation for  endurance events.  These are (1) increasing your aerobic capacity, (2) raising your lactate threshold (otherwise called anaerobic threshold) and (3) improving your Efficiency and Effectiveness, or as we call it, your Economy. 

Whatever you do leading up to your events ride in terms of training and preparation, you need to be focused on these three things.   

You may have heard the term, or be training to “functional threshold power", so shouldn’t that be the focus ?”, well, that is an output of your training, you need to focus on increasing your aerobic capacity and lactate threshold, only then will sustained power, and otherwise called functional threshold power increase as a result. 

A couple of months ago a good friend invited me to his “Speyside Tour”. Now I have ridden multi-day rides before, traversing the lengths of Britain, Spain and France, but never before where I needed to be fully self supported, needing to carry my own kit with me; previously we had organised either a support vehicle (my long suffering wife) or taxis to carry luggage, etc from that morning’s starting point to the evening’s destination.

This meant a rethink.