The slowest recovery ride

They say one of the hardest rides to do is a proper recovery ride. A recovery ride where you really take it easy. One hour of gentle spinning, nothing over 60% of max heart rate. The problem is that, because it feels so easy, we instinctively want to make a recovery ride a little bit longer and faster. It requires a certain confidence and discipline to really believe in the power of recovery.

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Believe it or not, I’ve done 40 mile ‘recovery’ rides and come back with an average speed of close to 20 mph! Good job I don’t have a coach to tell me off for breaking all the rules of recovery rides. But, after the National 100 yesterday, I really felt like a ‘proper’ recovery ride. I managed 16 miles, in 1 hour 15 – averaging 13.4 mph. I cycled to Ilkley, but couldn’t resist taking the scenic way back over the Cow & Calf climb. That’s the problem with Yorkshire, you go out for a recovery ride and come back with 500 metres of vertical ascent on the clock. I did managed to go incredibly slowly up the Cow and Calf. I don’t really enjoy slow recovery rides, but at least, this time, I managed to make it a recovery.

One interesting thing with riding so slowly is that there’s a different dynamic with cars. On some of the moor roads, you feel more visible, more of a presence because you’re going so slow. Part of me thinks I should speed up – just so as not to hold up the car behind.

I remember quite well the first time I went on a proper bike ride. I was probably 13 or 14. It was 35 miles to Burnsall. It was a huge achievement to make it and I probably couldn’t walk for the next 2 days.

In those days, the only training / racing I knew was to ride the bike and try and come back with the highest possible average speed. I used to religiously record my average speeds and try and improve them. I remember quite well, my average speed on that ride was 13.5 mph. That was the benchmark for quite a few months. By the end of the year, I’d managed an 18mph ride which I was absolutely chuffed to bits with! I never did recovery rides in those days. I think every single ride I did was to go as fast or as far as I could. There were no half measures, every ride was a race against the average speed on my 5 function speedometer.

But, then I learnt it’s nice to through away the computer and just enjoy the bike ride!

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