Designing a route for a group that rides at different speeds

Every club has the same Sunday problem. Eight people turn up, the fastest can hold 4.5 watts per kilo up a climb and the slowest can hold 3.0, and the route was drawn by somebody who is closer to the first number than the second. What follows is four hours of the same small humiliation repeating: a gap opens on every rise, the front waits at the top, the back arrives out of breath, and the group sets off again the moment they get there.

Most attempts to fix this aim at the riders — ride steadier, hold back, do more training. That works slowly, if at all. The faster fix is to change the shape of the route, because a route can absorb a spread of abilities in a way that willpower cannot.

This is about how to draw one.

The regrouping problem, stated honestly

On a flat road a mixed group is barely mixed at all. Drafting does the work: sitting in a well-organised line cuts your aerodynamic drag by something like a quarter to a third, and deep inside a large bunch computational fluid dynamics puts the drag on a sheltered rider below a tenth of what an isolated rider faces. A 3.0 W/kg rider on the wheel of a 4.5 W/kg rider is having a fine time.

Gradient destroys that. Once the road tips up past about 6%, speed falls to the point where air resistance stops being the main thing you are fighting and gravity takes over, and gravity does not care who is in front of you. What determines climbing speed is power divided by total mass, which is exactly the number that differs most between your riders. The group does not split because people are riding badly. It splits because the physics changed.

So the design question is not "how do I stop the group splitting" — you cannot — but "where do I let it split, and how does it come back together".

Three shapes that let a group come back together

Put the climbs where they can be waited out

A climb in the wrong place ruins a ride. A climb in the right place is the best thing in it.

The wrong place is 15 km from the finish with a fast descent and a main road afterwards. The group shatters, the fast riders are gone, and the last rider does the final hour alone into a headwind. The right place is somewhere with three properties: the top is pleasant enough to stand at, the descent afterwards is long and gentle rather than technical, and there is a flat run-in on the far side where the group can reform without anyone having to chase.

A climb in the first third of a ride splits a group that is still fresh and still talking. A climb at 80% distance splits a group that is tired, hungry and less inclined to be generous about it. If your route has one big hill, put it early. If it has four, make the last one the smallest.

Descents are the great equaliser, and you should exploit that

Riders differ far less going down than going up, because on a descent everyone is limited by nerve, corner radius and gravity rather than by watts. A route that finishes each climb with a long descent gives the whole group several minutes of near-identical speed, which is the cheapest regrouping mechanism there is. If you want the group to arrive together, end the hard bit at the top of something long and open. Our guide to descending faster and safer is worth passing round the club if the descents are where your slower riders are actually losing time.

The waiting arithmetic nobody does

Here is a rough calculation for a ride with four climbs, each about 350 m of ascent. Take a 72 kg rider holding 4.5 W/kg and a 78 kg rider holding 3.0 W/kg, fading slightly as the day goes on. Work out how long each takes, and how far the gap grows.

Three quarters of an hour. That is what the fast rider spends standing at the side of the road on a four-climb route, and it is why fast riders quietly stop coming to club runs. It is also why slow riders quietly stop coming: they are the only ones in the group who never get a rest, because their rest is being consumed by the act of catching up.

Notice what the arithmetic says about the last column. The gap does not stay constant — it grows, because the slower rider is accumulating fatigue at a much higher fraction of their capacity. Fatigue resistance late in a ride is a trainable quality in its own right, which we cover in durability and your power at hour four, but you cannot fix it on the day. You can only design around it.

The no-drop conventions that actually work

"No drop" is one of the most abused phrases in club cycling, because it usually means "we will feel bad about dropping you". These six conventions are the ones that survive contact with a real Sunday.

None of this works if the route only exists in one person's head. Write it down, share the file, and mark the regroup points on it as named waypoints rather than as a vague intention. Moveee's route planner will give you the climbing profile alongside the line, which is what you need to see where the splits are going to happen before they happen rather than afterwards.

Size the ride to the slowest rider's endurance

This is the part most groups get wrong, and it has nothing to do with speed.

Distance is the wrong unit. The slowest rider is not limited by kilometres, they are limited by hours in the saddle, and they are spending more of them than anyone else. A 120 km route that the quickest rider covers in four hours takes the slowest rider closer to five and a half — and those five and a half hours are ridden at a higher percentage of their threshold throughout. The ride is roughly twice as hard for them as the distance suggests.

So set the route by the longest ride the slowest rider has done recently, and add no more than about 10% to it. If that number is three hours, draw a three-hour route for them, not a three-hour route for you. The strong riders can add a climb loop, ride to the start, or do the last hour hard. All of those are easy. Making a rider who has never ridden more than 80 km survive 140 is not.

The endurance side of this is worth building deliberately rather than by accident — how to plan a 200 km ride is the long version, and building an aerobic engine over winter is the part that has to happen months earlier. For the riders at the sharp end, remember that a social ride ridden mostly easy is not a wasted day; the intensity distribution of well-trained endurance athletes is dominated by low-intensity volume, and a mixed-ability club run is a perfectly good way to accumulate it.

A worked example

Suppose your group spans 3.0 to 4.5 W/kg and your area has one decent range of hills 25 km from the café.

Draw a lollipop. Ride out together on the flat, with the strong riders on the front doing the work — that is what drafting is for. At the junction, take the loop through the hills; the climbs split the group and the descents partly reassemble it. Come back to the same junction, regroup properly, and ride the last 25 km home as one bunch at a pace the slowest rider can hold. Put the café at the junction rather than at the far end, so that the stop happens where the group is already together.

Total: one shared start, one shared finish, one regroup that everyone passes twice anyway, and a hilly middle where the differences are allowed to exist. Nobody stood in a lay-by. Nobody had to be told to wait. And the coffee stop did the organising work that no amount of shouting up the road ever manages.

The riders did not change. Only the shape did.