The Simple Joys of Going Fast

Groupride season is here! Five years ago, it opened a whole new part of cycling to me.

This newsletter is usually about riding very long distances. The correlate to that is that it’s usually about going steady, sustainable, relatively slow pace.

But sometimes bikes are about going fast. Regardless of the absolute speed you are personally able to achieve, there’s something very special about the feeling of moving, under your own power, faster than you’d ever be able to walk or run. As my partner once put it, “It feels like a superpower.”

Riding bikes is joy in so many ways. This week, let’s talk about the joy of speed; moreover, let’s talk about the joy of feeling yourself pushing, making that speed on your own.

Climbing Sure Is Different Than Pacelining

Indulge me a brief personal history.

Through most of my twenties, cycling was a solo activity for me, and happily so. It was my post-competitive sport, my hobby. It never really crossed my mind to seek out a team or organized meetup, as I did with baseball and soccer at the time.

In my late twenties and into my early thirties, I moved to Austria and cycling expanded for me. It took on an even greater aspect of adventure, and that adventure was often shared in small groups. What pass would we summit today? What picturesque landscape might we see? Which mountain hut will we stop at for a snack? It’s not to say that we went slow, or that we never shared pulls through a flatter area; but, I think it’s better said that, up and down through the Alps, we rode in one another’s company and for the pleasure of riding, not for the pursuit of performance.

Then in 2021, I moved to Chicago. I spent a few months riding on my own, exploring new routes just like I always had. I think it was in looking for local advice on where to ride that I came across the Chicago Cycling Club website and saw their ride calendar. So I went to my first group ride: the Monday night Intro to Group Rides.

What I found there was something that was conceptually familiar and physically foreign. The 20 rider paceline was a larger group that I’d ever ridden with, excepting a single race a couple years prior, but the idea of drafting and rotating is familiar to anyone who’s spent much time on a bike. I fell into rotation with the group, wanting to pull my share. But as we came into a faster section of the route (towards a sprint point, as it turned out, but I did not know that), I finished my pull and then failed to reattach myself to the back of the train. It seemed I was going to have made it about 15km with a “fast” group, and I was prepared to be ok with that.

As it happened, the sprint point came and went, the group re-formed, and I hung on for the rest of the ride. I came home completely shelled physically and so very, very happy. This was a different kind of riding than I’d ever done bfore, and it had me excited.

There’s Going Fast, and Then There’s Pushing Fast

Riding in a group once didn’t suddenly turn me into a crit racer, but it did open me up to a joy on the bike that I’d only had brief, brushing encounters with before. Yes, I’d worked myself to the limit on my bike climbing mountains. I’d hit 70kph blasting back down them. I’d occasionally had moments (solo and with others) where I’d been possessed of a cyclist’s high gone faster than normal for a kilometer or two.

Fast, flat group riding was - is - different. There’s a sense of being right on the edge much of the time. Or said differently, you feel aware of the energy you’re committing to each moment and the reality that your stores are continuously depleting.

You’re pushing.

I get how this kind of riding can be addictive. Even when you are making that conscious, continuous energy expenditure, there’s the awareness married to it that I am strong!

Fast group rides are filled with purpose, with intent. They are decidedly not the kind of thing you do on your own - there’s dependency on every rider around you paired with that lurking, motivating fear that the Group might chew up and spit out Solo You at any moment should you falter.

I don’t mean for this to sound intimidating if you’ve never ridden a group like this before. Plenty of groups are no-drop, so they’ll let you recover if you do fall behind for a moment. There is something very visceral about the experience, though, and I only mean to capture that ephemeral, fleeting high that comes when your body is pushed into a higher gear - and you find that you can sustain something you weren’t aware you were capable of.

Fast is Relative, and That’s Fine

Some of you may know (or inferred from the “Intro to Group Rides” title) that the Monday night CCC ride I started at is not the fastest ride around. It’s not slow - at the time it held pace at about 32kph (20mph), and I think it’s gotten even slightly faster in the years since. But it’s not the place where the fastest cyclists in the city go.

But it was - and to an extent still is - the right place for me. It is my fast ride.

“Fast” for you will be different from “fast” for someone else. There are a lot of different paced groups out there, and I can just about guarantee you’ll recognize the feeling when you get into a fast-for-you group. I recommend that you find one! Not only is it a lot of fun, but it’s a great component to a weekly training regimen, even for a bikepacker or randonneur.

There are a few groups in the city that I’ll ride with from time to time that get me working right through my upper power/heart rate zones. It’s like an interval session, except 1) I’m not stuck on an indoor trainer, and 2) it can be more realistic because you’re going to get fatigued just going along with the group and you’ll still have to put in high-intensity efforts, whether it’s a turn at the front or a sprint point. You’ll find out quick how long it takes your legs to recover from an effort and how deep you can go without falling off the pace.

If you’re a high-end racer, real interval sessions are still valuable for the specificity of training that they offer, but for my long-distance purposes I treat fast groups and interval workouts as nearly interchangeable.

April Showers, Erm, Evening Daylight Brings Cycling Group Rides

At any rate, group ride season is back! I did my first fast group of the season on Monday and was swept up all over again by just how good it feels to push hard like that. It’ll never be my primary way of riding a bike, but don’t sleep on a fast group ride - it’ll put a smile on your face. Right after it puts a grimace there from working you over.