WHAT OUR RIDES ARE LIKE

The Great Plains Bicycling Club offers a variety of rides and we are continuing to experiment with the right mix of longer and shorter rides.  The following description is current, but that doesn't mean that it is permanent.  If you would be interested in types of rides that aren't shown, or in more rides, please read about how our rides are planned.

At this writing, our Saturday rides are usually longer, while our Sunday rides are a mixed bag of rides that are usually shorter than our Saturday rides.  We also have short "social" rides early in the evening during the week.  Some of these rides are suitable for beginning riders, while others are not.  The purpose of this web page is to help you understand the types of rides that we do and how you might fit in.

• Saturday Rides -- A typical ride will start at 8am and might see 6 or 8 or 10 riders go 50 miles or longer.  We rarely go less than 40 miles on Saturday.  We'll typically take rest breaks perhaps every 10 miles to chat and regroup.  It depends on the mix of riders, wind, hills and where the C-stores and gas stations are.  The rides almost always involve finding a restaurant for lunch or a late breakfast.  We usually chat and take at least an hour.  Then we head back.

• Sunday Rides -- These are a mixed bag.  They almost always start later in the day.  Some of the rides will be 40 or 50 miles and fairly similar in pace to our Saturday rides, but many will be shorter and designed for an easier ride or for the person that is just building up their miles.

• Weekday Evening Rides -- Most of these rides are generally short – maybe only a few miles - and predominately social in nature.  Some of them just involve meeting at places like the Mill or Mo Java, but this pattern is much less established.  We'd love to experiment.

The question that a person that has never ridden with us before will probably ask is whether they will fit in with the pace of the other riders.  A racing cyclist may want to know if some of the rides are good for training.  These questions are easier to answer if you have ridden with other groups so that such things can be put into a context of things that you are familiar with.  Hopefully, one or more of the following generalizations will help you decide where you will be comfortable riding with the Club:

• If you aren't fast enough or have no desire to be a racer, but if you enjoy cycling and ride 20 miles or more with reasonable regularity and without discomfort, then it is likely that you will fit in.  This covers a fairly broad range of cyclists, however, so you may want to be a little selective with the ride or rides that you start with in order to avoid going too far too soon and getting saddle soreness.  Even an otherwise well-conditioned person will get a sore fanny if they try to ride 50 miles without getting their posterior accustomed to the mileage.

• If you ride 50 miles or so with reasonable regularity, or if you are a regular rider on such things as BRAN, RAGBRAI, etc., then you have nothing to worry about.  Please come ride with us.  You will fit right in.  (Don't worry if you don't have any idea what BRAN or RAGBRAI are.  They are 5 to 7 day recreational bicycle rides.  Many of our regular riders occasionally ride on them, but certainly not all.)

• For our Saturday rides, the usual pace is "average" for long distance riders that are not training for racing, although we may stop more frequently than most long distance riders.

• A loose rule of thumb is that a 50 mile ride will take 5 hours, a 70 mile ride will take 7 hours, etc.  We ride faster than 10mph, but the combination of a long bull session at lunch, rest breaks and the occasional flat tire results in a start-to-finish time that approximates 10 miles per hour.

• As a generalization, a person that is already in good shape only needs to get some riding time to get accustomed to the saddle.  That can happen in a few weeks if a person wants to ride every day.  Couch potatoes will take longer.  Having said that, several of our middle-aged riders are 40 pounds or so overweight, but they put in plenty of miles.

• With an occasional exception, our rides don't involve any kind of mechanical ("SAG") support.  Around town, this isn't terribly important, but it becomes more important when you are 25 miles out on the highway and something goes wrong.  On this point, we have two requests.  First, please ride a bicycle that is in good mechanical condition.  Brakes, tires, shifting and spokes should be checked regularly and maintained in good shape.  Some things that can go wrong with a bicycle can be difficult to repair without special tools and/or replacement parts.  With regard to flat tires, we expect that riders on our longer rides will have ridden enough to have experience changing and/or repairing tubes.  While we try to help each other whenever we have a problem, this is truly an area where there is no substitute for regular maintenance.

• The type of bike that you ride makes a difference.  Mountain bikes are OK for rides that go on rail trails, but we would advise you to avoid wide knobby tires.  Taking a mountain bike on a road ride of any distance makes enough extra work that the rider would need to be extra strong in order to be comfortable with a group riding bikes set up for touring or road riding.  There are exceptions to every rule, including this one, but please consider using a touring or road bike for our road rides.