High Performance Cycling Paceline Practice

On Sunday, Cascade’s High Performance Cycling met for their second skills workshop of the season, pacelines.

For starters, coach Tammy Metzger talked and walked the crew through a short clinic on paceline basics. Coach Tammy is a triathlete. Triathletes aren’t allowed to draft. I brought my bike with aero bars, which are a no-no in pacelines. Nothing like a couple of good counter-examples to illustrate safe cycling skills.

After the clinic we pedaled eastward toward a biker-friendly route scoped out by team leader Tom Meloy.

Members of Cascade’s High Performance Cycling show off the new jerseys.

I was lost at least 80% of the ride, and was 100% lost when I got separated from the group and decided to climb a hill instead of take a left turn. In the spirit of “high performance cycling” I figured “when in doubt climb a hill.” Coach Tammy chased me down to keep me from getting lost, but when she caught me she confessed that she was lost as well.

This was our way of giving the rest of the team an excuse to rest before the paceline practice began in earnest.

To formally practice paceline skills, we broke into 3 groups of 5-6 riders self-sorted by speed.

According to coach Tammy (who rode with group 3): “The first hour went by and I felt like I was at a race. I spent a great deal of time at threshold effort, with short bursts above that on hills. Once we got out to May Valley, we broke up into groups of 5-6 to practice our paceline skills. Finally, I was able to get some recovery between anaerobic bursts.“

I rode with the middle group, and one of my paceline partners noted that we were averaging about 21+ on the flats.

The hammerheads at the front initially reported accelerations of up to 26+ mph depending on who was pulling, but the most recent report claims 29.5 mph. At the current rate of inflation we should be up to well over 35 mph by the end of the week.

Check out HPC member Al Garcia’s map of our route.

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