The Group Chase (Skillz and Drillz – February 22)

After last week’s work on riding in a paceline, we moved on to the next step of utilizing that skill, working as a group to chase.  When a small number of riders escape off the front, it is usually too difficult for one person to pull back the move once it is established.  To accomplish this task, a rider must work with other willing members of his/her group to close the gap and retain enough energy to contest the finish.

Here is a full video of the class:

During the usual 1.5 W/kg warm-up, we went through our standard practice of moving around the group.  Only, this week it was a little more imperative to get in some good practice, as the day’s class is largely based on the tenet that all riders can maintain their positions within the group.  The basic concept for today was that a group of riders could chase down an individual or small group, expending less energy individually while going faster as a group if the riders collaborate.  This is basically the cycling version of the prisoners dilemma; riders must chose to cooperate to have a greater overall gain, although less of a relative gain or defect for a possible greater relative gain but little to no overall gain.  This week’s class showed that cooperation at times can be hugely beneficial, delaying the defect decision to much later in the race.

(If you need a great example of this, watch the last 30 kms of the Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne from 26 February 2017.  A small group of five riders, including Peter Sagan, escaped and began working together, almost in a team time trial format.  The much larger group behind continued to lose ground, despite multiple teams having multiple riders, because they refused to collaborate.  That decision to defect cost Greg Van Avermaet from BMC the chance to pull off the Saturday-Sunday double.)

During the class, we performed three iterations of the chase, assisted by riders who went off the front of the group by accident.  For the first iteration, I sat at the front at 2.0-2.5 W/kg (terrain dependent) and had the group work through the rotation of the paceline.  Riders in the middle and back were able to hold 1.5-1.8 W/kg while still going the speed of the group leaders, and everyone took turns at the front.  In no time, the gap to our lone leader plummeted, and we were back together.

After a brief slow to let the group bunch up again, we ran into the steeper sections of the Richmond UCI course.  I instructed riders to stay as close as possible to 2.5, knowing that we would still be strung out after two climbs.  At the top of 23r     d Street, I moved to the back and instructed all riders ahead to stay at 1.5 until I passed.  At that point they were to join the group and begin rotating through.  As the group swelled, the pace continued to pick up, and we eventually swept up all of the riders in front.  We repeated that same exercise a second time, as the rolling terrain gave us a great opportunity.

The key takeaway from this class is the benefit of working together in a group, when appropriate.  If everyone takes some time at the front, the larger, coordinated group can generally pull back an individual or small group, assuming that the strength of the individuals is relatively similar.  Let’s be honest.  We could have 40 of us taking turns pulling hard, and we wouldn’t pull back Tony Martin riding hard tempo.  But, within your categories, it is possible to pull back that one marginally stronger rider if you work as a team until you need to not do so.

On the same note, it is important to recognize when that cooperation is happening.  If your teammate is up the road, you need to identify that collaboration and try to disrupt it.  That is for another day, though.  Next week, we will be working on the sprint, but we will look at it from the time we stop cooperating to jump our former collaborators.  Thanks again for all of those who participated in SDR this week.  Until next time, RideOn!

The Paceline (Skillz and Drillz – February 15)

As we have talked about many times, riding in the group is one of the most important skillz you can develop on Zwift.  On the road, it’s probably number two to staying upright, but they often go hand-in-hand. We also went over the downside of group riding, the dreaded accordion effect.

As usual, we started our ride with the 1.5 W/kg warm-up with riders moving around in the group to get a feel for positioning.  After about ten minutes, we got into the meat of the class.  I moved to the front and directed the group to start moving up from the back, cycling through the front, and drifting to the back again.  I maintained the front position to help keep the group under control, but the basic premise was to show how a rider can move up, do a little work, and then recover in the draft of the group.   Of course, we did this at a relatively light pace compared to race pace efforts, but the concept is the same.   We did a few iterations of this drill at greater intensity to show how much faster a rider can go as part of a group vs solo.  This is a key learning point of today’s class.

In the previous few classes, we covered how a rider can execute a counterattack, one method being after catching a breakaway group.  To do so, you have to catch the break.  Working in a group without many teammates will require a rider to share some of the load.  The easiest way to do this is to keep the group’s pace high, while minimizing the amount of work each rider must do. That’s where the paceline comes into play.  In large races with teams with multiple riders, the pace-making is done by the designated individuals who run their own paceline at the front of the peloton.  It is sometimes hard to really see because of the large numbers of riders who do not appear to be taking part in the work.  In groups smaller than 20 riders, though, the vast majority of the riders will need to share some of the load during a hard chase.  The most efficient way to do this is via a paceline.

In the paceline, riders move forward as other riders finish their time at the front and pull off, or move to the non-wind side and drift to the back.  Once at the back, the riders rejoin the line, moving forward to take their next turn.  The most important aspect of the paceline is consistency.  If a rider surges upon taking over the lead of the line, the fluidity is broken, and other riders have to slow or accelerate to cover gaps.  That creates what is known as the accordion effect.  The surging and slowing is often not very noticeable at the front of the bunch, but the bigger the line, the more noticeable at the back.  The accordion effect can be such that the gaps grow so large that the paceline gets shortened and riders fall off the back.

In the second half of the class, I moved around the bunch trying to create gaps, while having the leaders maintain a roughly 2.0 w/kg pace.  At one point, the gap got created, and nobody moved across to the main field.  Quickly, the gap went from 10 seconds to 30, and we had to chase for a quite a bit of the recovery spin to catch back on.  Imagine that at much greater efforts, and you can see how a small bit of surging can destroy the back of the field.

To close out the day, we focused on keeping a very tight group while picking up the speed.  Over the remaining ten minutes, we gradually increased the effort from a 1.5 to a 2.5 w/kg, with riders rotating through the front to share the work and others keeping very tight to prevent the accordion effect.  Overall, the group did a great job, and most people were able to stay with the group.

During the next class, we will build on the paceline concept and go back to group work to chase down riders up the road.  We have worked on this skill before, but this time, we will do it as a semi-organized group rather than as individuals doing the chasing.  It will not be at a very hard pace, but you might get a good sweat going.  Until then, RideOn!