The Beatles weren’t wrong when they said “You get by with a little help from your friends.” Today, I rode into work and managed to persuade my work mates Craig and Caroline (pictured above) to come with me. To be honest, there wasn’t a great deal of persuading required. These two are mad keen cyclists. Staring at the backsides of your colleagues is a great way to start the day, especially if they are cyclists with rather toned ones!
Logistics are important when you ride with friends. Caroline, Craig and I started the “what day will we ride in this week” conversation on Monday. We had to all align our diaries and personal commitments and find a day that suited all of us. We also live in different parts of Napier, so organising where to meet and at what times needed to be sorted. The great thing was it worked like magic today, and we had a great ride in.
Riding with others is fabulous. There is the companionship you get on the way, and the trip goes by really quickly. Craig, Caroline and I are reasonably experienced cyclists so we drafted the whole way to work. This means one of us took a turn out at the front for a while with the other two tucked in behind and were sheltered from the wind. This provides an advantage to the following cyclists who essentially have a chance to recover their legs before it’s their turn to go out the front. We were riding between 28-30km/h most of the way in, which is much faster than I can do when I ride in by myself. There is also the motivating factor with others. You try your hardest to keep up because you are in a team situation and don’t want to let the side down.
Riding with others also requires you to have an extra heightened sense of what is going on around you. We rode in a line one behind the other which is the safest way to ride. In this situation not only do the three of us need to be aware of the traffic around us, but we need to be in tune with the other riders. I was aware of where Craig and Caroline were in relation to me and our surroundings the whole time. If you think about how much physical energy is expended on a bike, and couple that with the mental energy required to stay alert, it gives you some idea of what fitness level would be required for an event like the Tour de France where they ride over 3,600km in 3 weeks! That’s roughly equivalent to Cape Reinga to Bluff and back, plus some. Amazing!
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