Nice bikes, long trips, and carrying capacity

[dmaze]

I have come up with a reasonably nice bike. It makes me happy. I can go on longish trips with it, and perhaps the Climb to the Clouds people's assertion two years ago that a mountain bike outright takes 20% more energy to go the same distance is correct. (We were trying to account yesterday for it apparently being easier to climb on this bike, in spite of not having super-low gears for it...but that's not my point here.)

My actual question is this: how do you go on a long unsupported ride on a nice bike, and still have all of the stuff you need? With a seat bag you can carry a spare tube, tire levers, and a CO2 inflation kit; you can put two water bottles inside your frame for 2L, give or take, which goes pretty far. But for this I have no food, no lock, no maps, and only minimal tools. Right now I carry this all in a backpack, and while having 3L of instantly-accessible water is nice, my shoulders complain some about the load.

How do people go on long trips deal with this sort of problem? Credit cards and energy bars in their jersey, and hope to not get lost? Is putting a rack on my bike sacrilege, assuming it's possible?

Comments

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

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.

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

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.)

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[narya.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[narya.livejournal.com]

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.