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Bicycling 101: How to be a Considerate Rider
By Liz Sands
A basic part of group riding is to ride in a way that makes things easier for everyone else (or at the very least, you should not be making things more difficult for the others in your group!). I won’t claim perfection on all of the items below, but wouldn’t it be a nice New Year’s resolution for all of us to work on these skills?
Be steady: A steady rider maintains a consistent pace. If they do speed up or slow down, they do so gradually. A steady rider also is able to “hold their line” (a fancy way of saying they can ride in a straight line). They can look at the person riding next to them, or look behind for traffic, without their bike veering wildly.
Keep pedaling: Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to ride behind someone who goes: Pedal, pedal, pedal, coast. Pedal, pedal, pedal, coast. When they start coasting, you have to slow down to keep from getting too close to them. Then, after you’ve slowed down, they start pedaling again and you have to hurry to catch up with them. The rider behind you has to do the same thing and the ‘accordion effect’ gets magnified further back in the group. Often times when a rider is going ‘pedal pedal coast’ it’s because they’re in a gear that’s making them go too fast for the speed the group is going. Sometimes the answer is as simple as shifting into an easier gear, which will allow you to pedal continuously.
Don’t lead others into danger: It’s a standard part of ride briefings to ask riders to point out obstacles and hazards. You should also realize that folks riding behind you will be trusting you to ride a safe line around potholes or sand. In other words, even if you have the beefy tires and bike handling skills to ride through a big pile of sand, the riders behind you may not. Or, perhaps your great mountain biking skills allow you to bunny-hop over a pothole, but in the meantime you’ve led everyone behind you straight into the hole.
Communicate: Most of us are aware that we need to give hand and verbal signals for things like stopping, slowing, right and left turns. You’ll make things safer, and less stressful for others, if you also communicate about what you’re going to do in other situations. Let’s say you’re at the front of a large group waiting to cross a busy intersection. You know that you can get across before the next car passes, but that there’s not enough time for the whole group to get through. Rather than just launching yourself across the street, if you say, “I think there’s time for two or three of us to get across - we’ll wait for the rest of you on the other side”, then the others in the group will know that it’s not safe for everyone to go (and that they won’t have to try to chase you down once they are able to get across).
Help other riders: A few years ago I was on a ride and miraculously I was staying with the fast group. Then we got to the largest hill on the route, and I started falling behind. One of the other riders saw my plight, and actually dropped back from the group so that I could draft him and catch back up to the group. I think that’s a much better way to demonstrate how strong you are than dropping everyone on a hill! Try helping someone else out every now and then, and enjoy how good it feels to be someone’s hero.
Here’s to happy and safe riding in 2005!
Copyright © 2005 Liz Sands. All rights reserved.
(originally published in the TCBC Activity News: Jan-Feb 2005)
