No matter how fast I go, I want to ride my bike faster. Don’t you? While recreational cyclists are often happy just to get out and enjoy the fresh air, exercise and scenery, almost every road cycling enthusiast I know is always trying to go faster on their bike. Whether you are doing a solo training or group ride, riding up a mountain, doing intervals or taking part in a race, club ride or charity event, more often than not it’s about how fast you went, what your average speed was, or how long it took. It’s just the nature of the enthusiast cyclist.
As focused as we are on the goal of going faster, there are a dizzying number of differing road and lab tests, research models, personal experiences, beliefs, and wives tales on just how best to make fast happen. They range from practical and essentially free ones, like training more, to others that are quite expensive, like buying aero gear.
With so many tests, views and claims coming at us all the time, one of things that limits some of us from going faster is the uncertainty of what to focus our training and money on. I don’t know about you, but I hear or read something that sounds good and I’m immediately trying to figure out whether I should do it in addition to or instead of what I’m already doing. I’m also trying to figure out whether it’s a breakthrough or just a bunch bull sh*t.
Train with a power meter, ride with more aerodynamic wheels, lose a few pounds, shave my legs, do interval training…. All sounds good but what really matters and what matter most and second most, etc., and what should I block out for reasons of time, budget, the kind of riding I do, what I can tolerate, etc. What’s going to make me a better rider to sustain speed improvements over time vs. things that are short term improvements that will fade or be wiped out by the next new thing.
As a roadie myself, I’ve been trying to sort through this for years. Now that I’m blogging, I’ve been working on the research and drafting of this post for months to try to make some sense of it all.
With the season here, almost here or almost over depending on where you live and ride, I believe I’ve now got a pretty good handle on what makes us faster on a ride, over the course of a season, and from season to season.
Bottom line, there are a lot of things that make us go faster. I’ve organized these into 10 categories and put the categories in the relative order of what can make road cycling enthusiasts go faster and stay faster. There will undoubtedly be some new product technology, training approach, research study, or secret of the peloton that will come along that can perhaps make us faster still. If it is sound, I expect it will fit within one of the categories I’ve laid out and you and I can add it in the appropriate place in our how-to-go-faster toolboxes.
I want to underline that this is directed toward the road cycling enthusiast. It is not about what will make a pro or top amateur road cyclist faster or a triathlete or cyclocross rider faster or a recreational rider faster. It’s really focused on us committed roadies that ride regularly throughout the year, ride pretty fast already, do a lot of distance, are competitive with ourselves and sometimes with others, and invest serious time and money in this thing that we love doing.
If you are new to In The Know Cycling, welcome. I started this site for road cycling enthusiasts like you and me who want to know – but don’t have the time to do all the research, product and price comparisons to figure out – what gear you should get next and where you should get it. I bring a rider’s perspective; I’m not a member of the cycling media, don’t run ads on the site or go on bike company-paid new product introduction trips, have never been biased by working for a bike company or in a shop that only sells certain brands, and I buy or demo and return everything I test.
If you like what you read, you can save yourself time and money and support the site at the same time by clicking on and buying your cycling gear through the red store links or anything at all through these links at eBay Cycling and Amazon. The red store links take you directly to the listings for the gear I’ve evaluated, at stores that have that gear in stock, at the best prices, and have excellent customer satisfaction ratings. I update these links regularly by looking at over 60 stores I track that sell gear online. About half of these stores pay a small commission to the site when you buy through the links but I pick the stores based on price, stock and customer satisfaction, same as when I’m shopping for gear myself. There’s more on all of this at the about and support pages.
The 10 ways to ride faster on your road bike are:
1. Get Mentally Fit
2. Train to Ride
3. Practice Riding Techniques
4. Get Your Bike Fit
5. Drop/Hold the Weight
6. Position Yourself Right
7. Get the Right Gear
8. Suit up for Speed
9. Maintain Your Gear
10. Don’t Make Yourself Slower
2. Train to Ride
3. Practice Riding Techniques
4. Get Your Bike Fit
5. Drop/Hold the Weight
6. Position Yourself Right
7. Get the Right Gear
8. Suit up for Speed
9. Maintain Your Gear
10. Don’t Make Yourself Slower
In Part 1, I cover ways 1 thru 6. These are essentially about better training and better technique and are both the most important and most sustainable ways to get and stay faster.
In Part 2, I cover ways 7 thru 10, most of which is about gear you can use to enable you to go faster still.
You can read through each of these ways in order or click on any one of them listed above to go directly to the section that describes them. When you are done, you can click the back button in your browser to come back to the list above or scroll up and down to read other ways.
1. Get Mentally Fit
Cycling is a tough sport for the average adult enthusiast. Riding long distances at speed on varying terrain and road conditions, 4-6 days a week, month in and out, in the midst of work, family and other commitments is a mental, physical and scheduling challenge, to say the least.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
What I am telling you is that if you aren’t committed to a few specific riding goals, however ambitious or modest, and you aren’t mentally positive about riding as you push toward those goals, you aren’t going to get faster. More simply, you have to get mentally fit to go faster.
Let me break mental fitness into two pieces – goal focus and positive mindset. I will lean heavily on authors who have written for the blog published by Training Peaks, a meeting point for endurance training athletes, coaches and authors. I have used Training Peaks for years to guide and capture my cycling training but have no commercial relationship with them that is motivating me to refer to them. They just provide what I’ve found to great, and in this case relevant content.
Regarding goals, you are best off if you set a few specific ones for the season and some intermediate and short term ones to help you get there. For example, my goals this season are to ride 5 centuries, get my solo training speed up to 20 mph for my benchmark 40 mile route, and crack the 3.5 watt per kilo normalized power level.
To set up your own goals, check out the piece Adam Hodges wrote on guidelines for effective goal setting and Jim Rutberg wrote on goal setting mistakes to avoid.
Second, you need to lock in a positive mindset surrounding everything you’ll do to get faster. All the effort and time has to be something that makes you happy or that you can train to not make you unhappy. Doing the work to get faster can’t be something that’s a chore, that’s keeping you uncomfortably away from your work or family, or that you’d rather not be doing on certain hard training days.
You have to appreciate the benefit and be positive about suffering if you want to go faster.
Dr. Justin Colson has written extensively on the subject of cycling psychology including a great piece describing 15 reasons why cycling makes us happy. Just the act of riding, getting physically fit, riding with friends, and getting good at something else makes us happy. The research also shows that physical health also reduces stress, anxiety and depression. So just by cycling you will improve your mental health.
The question becomes, can you go beyond being happy cycling to being happy working your tail off to get faster? Here again, the research suggests you can if you have the right mindset. You need to focus on getting faster as part of your motivation to master cycling rather than to feed your ego to perform better. This focus will also help you enjoy cycling more.
Mental skills coach Carrie Cheadle talks about getting the balance right between days you train for pain and those when you ride for fun. For the breakthrough training or competitive days when pain and suffering are part of the deal, you need to have some mental tools to help push through. Cheadle has a good webinar where she gives you a context on pain and why you naturally hold back and some tools (starting at around 13:30) to push through the suffering.
There are more mental training techniques from world class racers, coaches and psychologists presented in other webinars here.
Of course, you can take your commitment to going faster, your ability to train with pain, your passion for cycling beyond a healthy level. If it becomes obsessive, you can feel badly if you don’t keep to your training plan, if you don’t achieve your goals, or if you feel conflict around the trade-offs between cycling and other things in your life. If or when this happens, you are getting to a negative mental state, a situation that Coulson writes about here and that you should definitely check out if you think your passion is turning into or being replaced by an obsession.
I can’t quantify the speed increase you’ll get by being mentally fit the way I will from other ways further down this list. Some say that mental fitness – being positive and goal oriented – is the most important way to improve your performance.
I can say with confidence that until you are mentally fit you will not realize the potential from the other ways that follow on this list to ride faster.
2. Train to Ride
If you are truly a road cycling enthusiast or feel you are on the cusp of becoming one, it’s likely been a few years in the making. I don’t know anyone who wakes up one day and makes or can pull off the commitment to cycling at the enthusiast level. It comes over time.
In the several years of your ‘conversion’ to enthusiast level cycling, you’ve undoubtedly realized that the better shape you are in the better you’ll ride. Likewise, it’s also probably become clear that getting in shape for cycling requires a cycling-specific training program. I used to play a lot of soccer to get in shape for ski racing – it wasn’t the same. Doing a lot of skiing never got me in shape for the cycling, etc.
Many years ago, when my friend Stu thought I was showing signs of taking riding seriously he told me about the bible. He wasn’t proselytizing, though I probably could have benefited from some divine intervention to improve my cycling back then. He was referring instead to the Cyclist’s Training Bible written by Joe Friel, the father of endurance training. If you don’t have a serious cycling training program, and even if you do, that book is the place to go to start or refresh one.
To ride faster on your bike, you need a cycling goal focused, cycling tailored training program. I talked about goals in the mental fitness section above. Do you want to ride faster over a time-trail length flat course, up a specific type of alpine road, on the Sunday morning 50 mile ride, over a rolling hills group ride, or for a specific race or century or other event you target each season?
One of the reasons I started using Training Peaks years ago was that it provided me one place to define my annual cycling goals, events and the limiters I need to overcome, develop a training plan to accomplish those consistent with the Cyclist’s Training Bible teachings, and give me an online ‘virtual coach’ that generates daily workouts both on the bike and complimentary off the bike ones. I can then upload and analyze my performance data against my training plan, intermediate and annual goals. (Note: The virtual coach feature has been phased out. Boo! They still offer purpose-oriented training plans you can buy or a service to match you with human coaches you can pay.)
You can also upload and store your data to Strava or Garmin Connect. While neither have a training plan component, both give you the ability to compare your performance against other riders along any number of road segments, something that Training Peaks doesn’t. You can certainly use both types of programs to motivate you.
For me, Training Peaks works better because it is designed to focus my mind on cycling mastery rather than Strava’s focus on cycling ego, the former being longer lasting and positive and the later short lived and potentially negative according to the research cited by Coulson that I mentioned earlier.
You can also hire a coach for more personal customization, attention and encouragement. That’s a little pricey for where cycling fits in my family priorities these days but it’s the ideal way to go if you can afford it.
Whatever route you take to develop a training plan, you should absolutely train with a power meter if you want to ride faster. Let me repeat that and say it more emphatically: TRAIN WITH A POWER METER. There is no better training tool or piece of gear or kit you can buy to ride faster.
Why is that? Training to improve your power and efficiency (power achieved at a given heart rate) at higher stress and intensity levels will make you faster. You can’t just go out and try to go faster on each ride. That’s not training. If you wanted to run a sprint faster, would you just go out and run the sprint every day trying to go a little faster than the day before? Of course not. It’s the same with cycling.
https://intheknowcycling.com/2015/04/15/how-to-ride-faster-on-your-bike-10-better-ways-part-1/
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