Response to comments

Response to some prior comments: No the guy in tight jeans isn't riding with us: he's with a fast group that passed us.

As you can imagine, the guys doing massive miles don't have too much time for other stuff. Practicing social skills may be part of the "other stuff" - and it may show in some cases. Or, maybe they had a stroke that nailed their speech center.

The relatively high speeds and low pulse rates may have several explanations: our altitude is a bit lower and may account for a few beats per minute. The tailwinds certainly help - we've had some pretty long sections where minimal pedaling gets us a lot of speed. And, although we don't ride pacelines all the time, even with a headwind, tucking in behind some big young guy saves quite a few watts.

And, recall that power (and thus heart rate at steady state) to speed ratio is non-linear. In the range that we're interested, figure that any percent increase in speed requires twice that much increase in power (and I need to increase my pulse rate by nearly 20 beats to increase my power output by 20%). But, the same holds true in the opposite direction: back off your speed by 10 percent, and you can back off your power by twenty percent and for me, I'll probably lose 15-20 beats in pulse rate!

The psychology is interesting to me: without trying to figure out what effort I can sustain for 5-8 hours, I settle into a comfortable range that results in tired but not exhausted at the end of the day - and it's very consistent from day-to-day: 95-105 beats, 135-141 watts - without trying to stay consistent, and with very different profiles from day to day (flat vs rollers vs long climb), that give the same average but very different distributions of power (steady, steady, steady in case 1, vs brief on/off/on/off in the rollers, vs loooong on then loooong off on the long climb then descent).