Tag Archives: Average Speed

Happy to be Average-ish

Posted on September 11, 2024 by alchemyrider
Graphic courtesy of flaticon.com

A Bicycling Magazine article titled The Average Cycling Distance By Age, According to Popular Cycling Apps popped up in one of my newsfeeds the other day. The article lists, among other things, how far users of Ride with GPS have cycled per ride over the past five years. Articles like this are catnip for me. I have to look up my average distance per ride data to see how I compare.

I use a Garmin cycling computer to record my ride data. The Garmin Connect software sends that data to Strava. Apparently, if it is not on Strava, the ride didn’t happen! Strava is an excellent social-purpose app, but extracting data from Strava for analysis is not straightforward. I use VeloViewer for a month-by-month or annual view of my ride data.

Veloviewer presents summary data in several ways. This Infographic shows the Total Ride Distance for a chosen year. I use Active Days as the proxy for the number of rides I did that year. You can see how much less I cycled last year compared to 2019.

Infographics courtesy of veloviewer.com

The Infographics also show Average Ride Speed. That led to looking up average cycling speed by age. I found that data on trainerroad.com in an article titled How to Improve Your Speed & Get Faster at Cycling: 3 Strategies to Improve Your Average Speed. The speed data there was for 2023.

This chart combines the average distance data from the Bicycling Magazine article and the average speed data from the TrainerRoad article.

I compare well to the average distance for my age group. I was 62 in 2109 so I have been in the 60-69 bracket for the past five years. My five-year average distance per ride is 55.10 km

My average distance per ride is dropping by the year though. That figure so far in 2024 is 40.98 km. Still reasonably above the 35.20 km average distance per ride for my age group in the Ride with GPS data.

I don’t compare so well against the Trainer Road average speed per ride data. My age group averaged 22.6 kph per ride in 2023. I averaged 21.3 kph. Like my average distance, my average speed has been falling since 2019.

My five-year average speed per ride is 22.7 kph. A whisker above the 2023 Trainer Road speed-per-ride average for my age group. I suspect the Trainer Road data has stayed consistent over the years. I have fallen behind that average since 2021.

I get an ego boost when I equal or exceed performance statistics like these.

Original image courtesy of http://www.j-guitar.com

I am also reminded that I have a lot to be grateful for. Being healthy and fit enough to ride my bicycle is a blessing. In an average way or otherwise.

Image courtesy of Microsoft Designer

Addendum

As I wrote this post I felt that I had covered this ground recently. Sure enough, in this post μ = Sum of Values ÷ Total Number of Values* I compared my 2023 distance and speed averages to the figures published in the  Strava Year In Sport Trend Report: Insights on the World of Exercise.

In the Strava report the age groups are separated by generation rather than by ten-year periods. I look quite good against the other Boomers in that Strava report.

Ego boost!

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μ = Sum of Values ÷ Total Number of Values*

Posted on February 21, 2024 by alchemyrider
Photograph courtesy of Justin Morgan at unsplash.com

I was chatting recently with a friend about bell curves. We were discussing employee performance evaluations. Whether or not to force-fit performance evaluations to a bell curve is a debate that often comes up.

A bell curve is a graphical depiction of a normal distribution. The theory is that the majority of employees should fall into the “Average Performers” category, and 15% to 20% of employees should fall into either the “Low Performers” category or the “High Performers” category.

Graph courtesy of updconsulting.com

This morning, I clicked on a link for a post titled Strava Year In Sport Trend Report: Insights on the World of Exercise. The post summarised average speed and distance data for cycling activities uploaded to Strava between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023. I wondered where I fell on the bell curve of cycling performance as tracked by Strava.

The post lists average cycling speed and distance by age.

There is very little difference in average speed across the four age categories. Just half a kilometre per hour separates Gen Z at 20.8 kph and Millennials and Boomers at 20.3 kph. Gen X averaged 20.6 kph.

My average speed in 2023 was 20.8 kph (indicated by the *). Above average as a Boomer.

Interestingly, Boomers had the longest rides, averaging 33.6 km per ride. Millennials had the shortest, at 22.2 km per ride. Perhaps we retired Boomers have more time to devote to cycling.

I am happy that my average distance of 40.2 km (indicated by the *) is above average for not just my Boomers category but for all age categories.

I am on the right-hand side of the bell curve for both average cycling speed and average distance per ride. For the population of cyclists posting on Strava, anyway. As a Boomer, that is a blessing.

* μ (mu) represents the average or mean of a particular sample.

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