Group Ride Etiquette

I’m going to keep today’s post short and sweet as I’ve written up a page that outlines all of Melbourne’s group rides.   A permanent link to this is on the navigation menu at the top of the page.  Many of you will be familiar with these rides, many will not care, but hopefully this will be useful to some of you who are new to the Melbourne cycling scene.  When I moved to Melbourne 4 years ago I wish that something like this existed. If anyone can suggest a way to improve this page or if anyone wants to add rides that I’ve missed, I’m happy to oblige.  I didn’t add Club Rides into this list as I don’t want to make it look like they’re open invite.

If any of you want to create something similar for Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, NYC, LA, Bangkok, Nottingham, or Winnipeg, feel free to write it up.  I’ll post it and Google will find it.  I realize that Bikely and MapMyRide do exist, however there’s got to be someone out there who will take the initiative to catalogue, organize and describe local rides better.  Any takers?

Group Ride Etiquette

The one thing I’ll say about etiquette when joining a new group ride is this: sit back, watch and learn. Don’t make someone else’s group ride into your hammer section where you’re off the front ramping up the pace.  There’s no quicker way to spoil a group ride and look like a nincompoop.  You don’t know if it’s a hard ride, an easy ride, if there are dangerous sections, which direction to turn, if the terrain goes up or down, etc.  No matter how good of a bike rider you are, you’ll probably mess it up if you’re trying to control the ride your first time out.   The best thing to do the first time you join someone else’s bunch ride is to sit in and perhaps do the odd token pull-through if that’s what the rest of the group is doing.   Carefully watch and see what the rest of the bunch is doing and do the same.

I remember making this rookie move when I first moved to Melbourne and tried to take control of the Friday Morning ride (which is a little ring recovery ride).  I was constantly trying to ramp up the pace and looked like a fool in doing so.  I still do it, but now I’m aware of it  😉