Yet again this morning I set off thinking I’d just take it easy but it’s very hard to do that. I ended up doing pretty well with a pretty good average speed. This was still with soft tyres on the bike.
On the way back I stopped at Evans and topped my tyres up. I also put the saddle up a bit as I think it had been slipping down.
The bike felt fantastic afterwards – it’s amazing how much difference these little changes make. I was getting up to 17 MPH easily on the flat and was over 16 what seemed like most of the time.
Why then was my average only 12.9? I think this is because I now tend to coast more at lights. If the light is read I will stop cycling well in advance in the hope that by the time I get to the lights they will be green. This means that I am stopped for a shorter time but means that I am moving for longer so my ride time goes up.
If I was just trying to get a high average speed I would pedal full speed to a red light, stop dead than power away accelerating as hard as possible. This would be VERY inefficient though and I’d ge ta lot more tired. It’s also good not to stop so that you don’t have to take your feet out of your pedals as it’s always a bit of a paid getting them back.
I noticed this at some lights today. I had done about 4 miles already and my average was around 13.3 MPH. I coasted up to some lights – which took a while and after the lights my average was under 13 MPH.
It’s a shame that this affects the numbers the way it does but I’m not going to stop doing it. It just means my average depends more on how lucky I am with lights rather than how hard I pedal.
O: HRav:132 kCal:283 D:5.0 Av:13.2 Max:20.4 T:23:03.1
R: HRav:147 kCal:836 D:11.9 Av:12.9 Max:27.4 T:55:31.3
No comments:
Post a Comment