dmaze

The list I've seen other places:

-your underseat bag has spare tubes, tire levers, a $20 bill, credit card, insurance card, cell phone, and very small disgusting emergency snack (like gu). Possibly also your map, but you have cleverly xeroxed only the parts of the map that you might actually need.
- your bike frame has two water bottles and your pump.
- lock? you're not stopping, you don't need to stinkin lock ;-)
- the back of your bike jersey contains less evil snacks.
- your cue sheet is somehow affixed to your handlebars.

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I've looked at new shiny bikes at a couple of different bike shops, and I always ask about racks (partly because at the time I was unsure if I wanted a new bike to do everything, commutes and grocery runs, or just be for long fun rides). Anyway, I've been told you can definitely put a rack on an entry-level road bike (Trek 1000, for instance). I don't know how quickly that falls off as you move up, though. :)

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dmaze

I think what I have out of Specialized's catalog is a shinier version of their entry-level road bike, if that makes sense. The very short description from Specialized's list of road bikes is "recreational endurance road" which does actually match my use case pretty well. I also think it's possible to put a rack on my bike (though not 100% sure).

So if I'm going to be carrying this amount of stuff either way, will a rack weigh as much as the entire rest of my bike? Or is this just Something You Don't Do?

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So if I'm going to be carrying this amount of stuff either way, will a rack weigh as much as the entire rest of my bike? Or is this just Something You Don't Do?

Unless your bike is *really* light, it doesn't seem like the rack weight should matter that much. (I have no actual data, but as reference to what I'm trying to say, I can't tell if this is a serious question.) I'd go with the rack, if your bike has the eyelets or whatever for it.

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Ooh, it occurs to me that this would be a good way to handicap the better riders in a large social ride -- make them carry the gear.

(2 Liters of water goes far?)

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dmaze

Well, on Saturday's ride it took me about 7.5 hours to go through 3 liters of water. That would imply (if water consumption is proportional to time) that 2 liters would last for 5 hours, which is actually pretty far especially if you're going faster than ducklings-bike speeds, and you can probably find more water somewhere along the way (maybe in the restroom you'll need during that time too).

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Hmm, I usually go through 12-16 ounces of water per hour of exercise.

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If I were exercising for a shorter amount of time (like 1 hour and then stopping), I'd go through about 16 oz. If I'm exercising longer than that, my stomach will not be able to process water at that rate. This seems to be a common problem among cyclists.

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Yeah, 2 liters of water doesn't get me very far either. Hence, I make the mob stop for bathroom breaks. :)

You might enjoy deconstructing the big ducklings-bike groups, with everyone and their various levels of hard-core-ness, or insecurity, or whatever, all trying to go on one social ride together. :)

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I have been thinking about it because I get lots of stories.

I suspect that one solution is to set a pace for the first hour of the ride and if people are unhappy with it a third of the ride should split off to go faster or slower. But that means deciding that the bike goal is more important than the social goal, or, in other words, that it's impossible to herd more than 5 cats on bikes at a time.

Otherwise the bike trip will always be slower than the fastest people want it to be. There's no way to get around it.

I don't know how this plan works with navigation and bike knowledge, though.

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dmaze

It feels like it'd abstractly work to have a long-and-fast group, a long-and-slow group, and a medium-length group...but now I've created the horrible social situation of turning an otherwise social bike group into having "A", "B", and "C" divisions. And if only 5 people turn out, you don't actually want to force the slow person into their own group, not only making them feel slow but also losing on the socialness.

I have been putting together cue sheets for the routes this year, and I want to be able to put together maps. The problem is that I know where I'm going because I've looked at it on a map, so I know that when the cue sheet says "1.1, Great Plain Ave; 0.1, L South St", it means that we go straight until we cross the Charles into Needham and then almost immediately turn left. But if you haven't tried to plan the route it's just a list of directions, and if you miss one, you're lost. Trying to come up with a map on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper that both captures the entire trip and has enough detail to be useful is also tricky.

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nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com

I much prefer having the entire group stick together until some set bail-out point. That way, everyone bikes together for a while at an intermediate speed, and then the less ambitious people can (1) turn around at the end of the Minuteman or (2) get onto the commuter rail. Mostly, I think that navigation can be pretty hard, especially if everyone in one group is lacking a bike computer (to tell when the turns are supposed to happen) and has never ridden the route before. I think our current bike group is pretty sociable and we can handle going a bit slower in order to suck more people into doing the activity.

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desireearmfeldt

Yeah, having the bail-out point be somewhere everyone can find their way home from is important. :)

I feel like the point is largely social; that is, if people wanted to bike optimally, they'd go alone, rather than inviting/joining an indeterminate number of friends. But that doesn't mean there is no biking goal; and it's frustrating to have a goal and get thwarted. Possibly that means the goal needs to be specified beforehand, so that the assumption is that everyone has agreed to aim for that goal. We already do this, i.e. name the route, estimate the mileage and state stops/food plans as appropriate. But if speed gets to be too much of a problem, the person calling the plan could specify further: I want to try for an average of N miles an hour, or I want to return by Y time which means N miles an hour, or whatever. People could then sort themselves out if they felt they weren't up to the specified goal. (Of course, I myself would be a little baffled trying to estimate my comfortable sustained speed, for example, and I imagine I'm not the only one...but it's a theory.) This would, of course, make the activity more exclusive, which means a social tradeoff not necessarily worth the gain.

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Mostly agreed, but it's worth mentioning that biking alone isn't necessarily optimal. You don't have slightly-faster people to push you, and I'd be a little hesitant about going on long rides alone for safety reasons as well.

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I'm not sure about this. It seems to me that "intermediate speed" doesn't work particularly well for people at either extreme -- the fast people are frustrated because they can't go fast (unless they've resigned themselves ahead of time to having a social weekend ride, not a particularly working-hard ride) and the slow people are frustrated that they can't quite keep up.

Also, I feel like (with this weekend's group of people, for instance) the discrepancy is more in pace and less in distance, so a bail-out point doesn't necessarily help. (Well, it does, but not in the intended way exactly: if I try to maintain above a comfortable distance pace *for me* for a couple hours, I will happily jump on the commuter rail, partly because the activity isn't particularly fun and partly because I'd be feeling all guilty about slowing people down.)

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Lots of brainstorming here; none of it is particularly well thought out.

Anyway, to me it's not necessarily terrible to say that if the mob turns out to be above some critical number, to split it into hard-core and medium-core groups (or medium-core and squishy-core, if you will). It's really hard to keep 8-10 people moving, because if anyone needs to stop, then everyone should, and it's important for people to eat or stretch or whatever.

It may not be horrible socially either. The slow person might be happier in a squishy-core group anyway. Maybe it does come back to goals: can you hold together a large-ish group if some people are trying to work their way up to a century, and some are trying to see lots of pretty sights and generally enjoy themselves? (Obviously the goals can, and maybe should, be more specific than these.)

A lot of us have Eastern Mass bikemaps. Maybe it'd help if, at the meet-up point, we spent 10-15 minutes where the person who planned the route and put together the cue sheet (I guess this is always you) went over it with whoever else was interested? This might be nice even if there's no splitting up; for instance, I think the hard climb in Roslindale would've been more easily doable if we *knew* it'd be followed by 2.3 miles of Turtle Pond Parkway descent. :)

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I think if you have subgroups with wildly disparate paces, it might make more sense to have a couple of different routes and have the groups meet up.

That said, if the typical speed of the various riders is all within a range of about 5mph, it's not really that hard to stick together. People will get more spread out, but will catch up pretty quickly at interesections, rest breaks, etc. I've seen 15+ people do this happily.

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desireearmfeldt

When there are frequent intersections and rest breaks, sure. Otherwise, it seems like people do get pretty spread out if everyone rides at their comfort speed without regard to staying in a pack. Though I suppose if there were pre-specified stopping places that everyone knew ahead of time, it wouldn't matter if people got spread out, and there wouldn't be the stress of being the person at the back who's lost sight of everyone *and* has no idea where/when the next random stop will happen. (Tricky to manage on an unfamiliar route, though.)

The other difficulty with the catchup game is that the person going slower gets shorter rest breaks than the person going fast, but probably needs longer ones/more of them (if the slower person has been been trying at all to follow the group, i.e. pushing past their default speed).

I think terrain makes a big difference, too. I'm not actually thinking of hilliness, though obviously that has effects, but rather of traffic etc. Some routes offer more or fewer convenient places to stop; also some make it easy to ride side by side and/or pass, while others don't.

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I think that this last ride was particularly bad on giving shorter rest breaks just due to unusually bad communication between the front and rear of the group. Alas.

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nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com

Yeah, I have always been a bit confused how people who go long-distance touring will need front and back panniers or actually some kind of towed cart...but will also have road bikes. I mean, by the time you're carrying around a tent and sleeping bag, why not just go with a bike with tougher tires as well.

My other unrelated confusion is whether losing 5 pounds off your bike, assuming same tires, is the same as losing 5 pounds off your butt, as far as biking effort.

From:

dmaze

I've also heard the criticism that people spend a lot of money on very light bikes, when they could be healther and have less total mass by losing weight themselves. I didn't intentionally set out for a very light bike, but it was what Wheelworks handed to me, it was about the price I expected to pay, it had the features I wanted, and it was in fact more rideable than the one-cheaper in the same line.

(In contrast, the bike

fredrickegerman and

narya have is intentionally heavy, but I do now see that

narya's commute is substantially half-paved roads...I wouldn't try to commute on my new bike.)

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Well, I'm glad my choice of bike makes more sense to you now. I didn't realize you hadn't experienced the wonders of that part of my commute before.

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I have the impression that if you're going to lose 5 lbs from somewhere in the bike + person system, you'd do a little better to lose 5 lbs that's higher up rather than lower down. I'm not sure if that's truly accurate, but if so it would argue for lightening the person.

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I have to admit I was bewildered when people were astonished that I did a triathalon (just 12 mile bike) with an ordinary commuter bike (I hesitate to call it junky because I believe

76trombones did actually choose it.

My goal was to see if I could do it, and I didn't see the point in buying more and more expensive equipment to do it; that would not make the goal any more interesting (and not make me any healthier.)

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Really, people were surprised by that? I thought Danskin (at least in 2003) had a lot of first-timers with relatively junky bikes. But then when I did the triathlon with the 27-mile bike ride, I seriously didn't see another mountain bike the entire day.

OK,

dzm, time to stop hijacking your post with not entirely related comments... :)

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Yeah, people were similarly surprised that I biked the PMC on a ten year old low end hybrid that I had bought used. But, it was certainly good enough to go the distance, which was all I cared about.

That said, having a bike that's actually the right size has been much kinder on my knees - if you're working up to more biking, you may hit that point too.

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Makes sense. I have not worked up to that level of biking.

I think my long-term biking goal is to be able to use a bike to commute distances of 20 or 30 miles round trip, with ample break in between. (Like going to my parents house down the street from the Dedham courthouse, or my friend's house past Lexington Center off the bike path.)

My short-term biking goal is to use the bike for carrying errands within five miles, and to/from the Fells for walks there (I have no interest in mountain biking, though.). I suspect that means I should get a rack or somesuch. Also I should probably upgrade the lights and reflectors.

My guess is that working on me and keeping the bike tuned will be sufficient for this summer at least.

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