Average Sportive speed, some real data

General cycling advice ( NOT technical ! )
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geomannie
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Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by geomannie »

Hi

The thread on average speed viewtopic.php?f=1&t=127382 reminded me that a couple of years ago I crunched the arrivals times from the Etape Loch Ness Sportives for 2016 & 2017 in which I participated. While I am not a fast rider, I was curious as to how my performance compared to the other pariticpants.

I was quite intigued by what the data show. The arrval times for male finishers were asymmetic. There is a subset of very fast riders, a hump of the "average" riders (I was towards the end of the hump) and a long tail of slower participants.

The results for the ladies is possibly more intriguing. The fastest, of which there were very few, were almost as fast as the men. The ladies arrivals curve, however, is more symetrical than the men's with a broader hump suggesting more variability is ladies cycling speed.

The slowest men and ladies had similar arrival times.

Only 10.5% of male participants averaged 20mph or faster (335 out of 3181 finishers), whereas as only 3 female (947 total) averaged over 20mph. (see purple average speed line on the graph).

60% of male riders averaged over 15mph, 24% of female riders averaged over 15mph.

Results in years 2016 & 2017 were very similar,

What does it all mean, who knows?, but I enjoyed the exercise of number crunching .


Average speed.jpg
geomannie
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mjr
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Re: Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by mjr »

IIRC they should both fit Poisson distribution, as you'd expect there to be a minimum achievable time and a long tail upwards.
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fossala
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Re: Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by fossala »

How much climbing?
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foxyrider
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Re: Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by foxyrider »

I think you could apply that to most sportives - typically the slowest riders will take twice the time of the fastest.

Most sportives i've ridden i've been about the at the slower end of the fast pack if that makes sense, call it the fast 10%.

What this equates to speed wise varies somewhat, a hilly event it might be 17mph, a flat one over 20mph and of course distance will affect things too. I get top 10% with @ 19mph for a 200km flat event I do.
Convention? what's that then?
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thelawnet
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Re: Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by thelawnet »

I think I have not quite the right chart here, but you can get lots of data here

https://www.evanscycles.com/ride-it/rideit-rider-times

Route profiles are also available. They have three route profiles, the Long, Medium & Short. For 'Thetford', these were 62/85/120km, and each had ~5.8m/km of climbing (flat, in other words).

The three plots are long, medium, short, with speeds in mph

Image


There is a cluster from 14mph to just below 17mph for the long group, the medium is more widely spread so the cluster is all the way from 9.5mph to 17mph, and the short from 9 to 13mph.
Geoff.D
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Re: Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by Geoff.D »

I, too, like graphs as a way of presenting data. They demand the exercise of the old grey matter to tease out the implications. But, as much as this, you have to work out what they don't imply. It's easy to make erroneous conclusions.

Given that there are such limitations, I'm often left with a set of questions which the data can't answer. For example - "How do the groupings identified by the OP relate to the ages of the riders? Of course, there's no answer.

Similarly, in the comparison of the women's groupings to the men's, I am left wondering what an age comparison would show.
thelawnet
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Re: Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by thelawnet »

Geoff.D wrote:I, too, like graphs as a way of presenting data. They demand the exercise of the old grey matter to tease out the implications. But, as much as this, you have to work out what they don't imply. It's easy to make erroneous conclusions.

Given that there are such limitations, I'm often left with a set of questions which the data can't answer. For example - "How do the groupings identified by the OP relate to the ages of the riders? Of course, there's no answer.

Similarly, in the comparison of the women's groupings to the men's, I am left wondering what an age comparison would show.


I suspect there is relatively little correlation in that I imagine some of the slowest people are non/new-cyclists and reasonably youthful, whereas the older cyclists may be lifelong cyclists - I suspect that to the extent that age is a limiting factor on cycling speed, it ignores the fact that most people don't cycle at all.

Of course if you go on a CTC ride, the slowest group may be the oldest, but this is a different self-selecting pool of riders. A sportive is not representative of all riders.
whoof
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Re: Average Sportive speed, some real data

Post by whoof »

I think there's also a difference in Sportives between average riding speed and the average speed as calculated between the start and finish time.
I've done a handful and they have feed stations. I've noted that whilst some people stop and possibly have a cup of tea, a bacon sandwich and a chat and will take 15 minutes others run in, fill a bottle and stuff some food in their pocket and will be gone in less than a minute.
I've overtaken the same person on the road three times due to their enhanced cake eating prowess.
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