Finding Your Pace
Before setting out on a multi-day or multi-week cycle touring trip, and especially if you’re planning on riding for a few months or even longer, it’s essential that you familiarize yourself with your bike. Get comfortable with how it handles, how the brakes respond, and how the gears shift. Most importantly for your endurance and longevity on your cycleventure, is to find your own particular riding pace, pedalling rate, or cadence – the pace at which you feel most comfortable riding.
Your “Goldie Locks” Pace
Spinning too low or too fast is exhausting and makes you feel and look like an idiot. On the other hand, trying to spin in too high a gear and straining on every grindingly slow pedal stroke feels awful and risks injury. You need to discover your own “Goldie Locks” pace – neither too fast nor too slow and just right for you. It should be comfortable but also brisk enough to maintain your desired average speed on your ride. The way to do this is to take your bike for a spin on flat ground, get up to your desired average riding speed, and adjust your gears until you feel you have just the right amount of resistance – something you could maintain for hours while still maintaining your target speed, all the time keeping your butt on your saddle. This is your pace. You will likely find yourself adjusting your pace as you gain more strength and experience. Over a long ride you should be focused on maintaining your pace – you will be more efficient, maximize your overall endurance, and reduce stress on your body. Once you’ve found your pace, you should head out on a longer ride featuring some uneven terrain (with hills), where you’ll be forced to adjust your gears to maintain your pace. When you’re riding focus on adjusting your gears up and down to maintain your pace constantly over the varying terrain of your ride. At first you’ll need to focus on this at all times while riding. Eventually it will become second nature.
Shift Before You Have to
If you know you’re coming to a hill, before you start your climb, you should shift down a gear. You want to feel a slightly easier resistance before you feel the added strain of the approaching climb. By shifting down before you have to, you’ll give yourself an opportunity to adjust to your cadence before you start your climb. You don’t want to be adjusting your gears after you start climbing and then have to work harder just to maintain your pace. The opposite is true when you see the apex of your climb approaching – you want to shift your gear before your crest the hill to maintain your pace. Finally, be sure to shift your gears down before stopping, such as at a red light. You don’t want to have to grind it out in top gear when the light turns green, especially on a fully loaded touring bike. You should get in the habit of downshifting to your “starting” gear before stopping.
Measuring Your Pace
If you’re naturally inclined toward the science of things and want to get technical about your pace. You can measure it. Cycling experts suggest that the ideal pace for maintaining endurance over long periods, such as cycle touring trips, is a pedalling rate of approximately 70-90 pedal revolutions per minute (RPM). Most cycling computers can measure your pace for you. If you don’t have one, you can use the stopwatch function on your smart phone by setting a timer for 30 seconds, count your pedalling rotations, and then multiply that number by two. This will give you your cycling pace expressed in RPM.