Riding with the Pack or Going It Alone

By Coach Martha Handford

I am often asked by my athletes whether it is better to train with a group or alone. Typically, I recommend training alone for all your critical workouts because it can be very difficult to do many of the heart rate- or power-specific workouts with a cycling group. Often times, however, we want to share our ride-time with others, especially if you are logging a lot of endurance miles, so here are a few ways to do some of your training rides with your cycling friends without sacrificing quality training time:

Meet up with your cycling friends after you have done your hill repeats or intervals; ride with others for the endurance part of your ride, but keep your ride within the duration and HR/power zone prescribed.
Communicate with your cycling friends prior to heading out on your ride and let them know what you have to do and ask them if they want to join you. For example, if you have to do a few hill repeats, maybe they will do them with you, at their own pace, then you can ride together for the rest of your ride.
Ask if you can set the pace for the group, and then be sure to ride within the HR/power zone prescribed for your workout. This is particularly effective on MTB rides with a small group of well-matched cyclists. Nevertheless, even if you are asking your cycling friends to push themselves a little bit to keep up with you, as long as it is reasonable, they will probably like the challenge (and they will get faster)!
If riding with your cycling friends usually means waiting for them, you can ride ahead and loop back every 5 or 10 minutes (just let them know what you are doing!). This is a good tactic if you are doing a long ride where you need to do some power bursts throughout or you need to attack the top of every climb; you can use your recovery time to loop back or “wait” for the group to join up.
You can also use easier gears and higher cadence to keep your HR in the correct zone while riding a comfortable pace for others in your group. This works well for base or endurance miles on your road bike, as long as your cycling friends are not too much slower than you.
Finally, when doing road miles, you can often ride within your prescribed HR/power zone by either staying at the front of the group and creating a draft for the slower riders (if you are one of the stronger riders in the group) or, by staying in the middle of the group and drafting off the faster riders (if you are riding in a group that is a bit stronger than you are). For this to be effective training you need to be honest about where you fit into the pace of the group and you need to be disciplined about riding within the prescribed HR/power zone for your workout.

In the end, critical workouts are most often performed best alone, but with a little creativity, advanced planning, and accommodating cycling friends you can incorporate some social time into your training time.

Martha Handford is a Sport Factory mountain bike and cyclo cross coach and athlete who took the 2007 season off to start a family. Martha found the lack of information available about being an athlete and a mother frustrating, so she decided to write a commentary about her experiences as she returns to coaching and racing in 2008. Martha can be reached at coachmartha@sportfactory.com.

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