Tips for surviving first chaingang

andyeb

Imposter wrote:

Fair enough - but you shouldn't need a HRM to tell you that you can't maintain the pace you are riding at.

Maybe I shouldn't. But the fact is I'm not good enough at RPE to tell me the difference between "quite hard" and "so hard I'll manage it for my turn on the front and then get dropped".

DeVlaeminck

...

DeVlaeminck

andyeb wrote:

I take your point about monitoring heart rate. But if you are on the front, and therefore setting the pace, a heart rate monitor can show you if you are consistently going so far into the red on a climb or when fighting a head wind, that you have just minutes before you will blow up.

For example, I know I can sustain 85% MHR for an hour, but there's a fine line between that and 90+% which I can sustain for just 5-10 minutes. I struggle to distinguish between these on Rated Perceived Exertion alone - they both just feel hard! 95% feels like really hard, but once my heart rate has gone that high (i.e. has had time to catch up with a sustained effort), I'm already totally cooked and would need to drop it back to base training pace to recover.

So to directly answer your original question - I might use my heart rate monitor to decide how long to stay on the front, at a given fixed pace. I setup alerts on my Garmin, so it beeps at me if I go above a set heart rate, which means I don't have to look down.

If you can't hit 95% mhr without sitting up you need to learn to suffer - not wanting to sound dismissive of your thinking but read what people who ride chaingangs and race are telling you - ditch the hrm alert and get stuck in - in a small group if you feel you can't continue do shorter turns but there is. No shame in getting dropped on a chaingang.