Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
I have re read this thread this morning, and I think @Moon bunny 's strong Mexican accent may have given me the wrong idea...
Average speed by age
- Thread starter mpemburn
- Start date
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Illaveago
Guru
- Location
- Chippenham,Wiltshire.
Oh! You've gone and spoilt it now !
I was doing rather well according to their figures!
Years ago I used to work on the average speed of 12mph if I had to cycle to work on the odd occasion . I used to get to work in time so my estimation must have been close . That was set in varying conditions .
I am over 60 and my average speed seems to have increased since taking up casual cycling again . It does depend on the route and weather conditions though . My favoured route is realatively flat and so I can put on some speed . My other route is a constant climb of 150 ft over several miles . It can be a right drag especially if there is a head wind . Lovely on the way back as I can freewheel most of it .
The road surface can also have a major effect . Riding along on a smooth section of tarmac and you can fly along . Whereas riding on a surface that is like a ploughed field will slow you down and also sap your energy !
I was doing rather well according to their figures!
Years ago I used to work on the average speed of 12mph if I had to cycle to work on the odd occasion . I used to get to work in time so my estimation must have been close . That was set in varying conditions .
I am over 60 and my average speed seems to have increased since taking up casual cycling again . It does depend on the route and weather conditions though . My favoured route is realatively flat and so I can put on some speed . My other route is a constant climb of 150 ft over several miles . It can be a right drag especially if there is a head wind . Lovely on the way back as I can freewheel most of it .
The road surface can also have a major effect . Riding along on a smooth section of tarmac and you can fly along . Whereas riding on a surface that is like a ploughed field will slow you down and also sap your energy !
Dogtrousers
Kilometre nibbler
According to the made up figures in the article I'm at or around the average speed for my age, which is good ... but my FTP is 2.5 times higher than my age average. Maybe my brakes are rubbing.
Still, we've all clicked on it and fired up some adverts so the author should be happy.
Still, we've all clicked on it and fired up some adverts so the author should be happy.
Think you need to stop going round and round in circles and draw a line under this.
At Christmas, yule log a ride that goes off on a tangent.
Dogtrousers
Kilometre nibbler
That strikes a chord.
Well, there is a strava segment I refer to as no-noah, because I avoid the arc.
monkers
Veteran
I'm not going to call the figures 'made up', because I doubt they are, but agree that it would certainly be better if they were accredited. This is a magazine style presentation by a college student in the USA. As such the quality is about what you might expect.
For those of us in the UK, including me, who were feeling a little smug initially that we do better than the figures suggest, we need to pause. Those figures are likely not average for the UK but for the USA. Why does that matter? Well the official data is that adults in the USA are twice as likely to be obese as is the case in the UK accompanied by lower activity rates. Childhood obesity rates in the UK are less favourable with boys tending to be more obese than girls and similar to USA levels. FTP data tends to come from those who are physically active. It would be a challenge indeed to gather that data from those who have never performed an FTP test. I never had myself before the age of 63. We should therefore quite reasonably expect average FTP in the UK to be reported as higher than the USA.
I also searched the net a little and found the same article at another source penned by a different named author.
For those of us in the UK, including me, who were feeling a little smug initially that we do better than the figures suggest, we need to pause. Those figures are likely not average for the UK but for the USA. Why does that matter? Well the official data is that adults in the USA are twice as likely to be obese as is the case in the UK accompanied by lower activity rates. Childhood obesity rates in the UK are less favourable with boys tending to be more obese than girls and similar to USA levels. FTP data tends to come from those who are physically active. It would be a challenge indeed to gather that data from those who have never performed an FTP test. I never had myself before the age of 63. We should therefore quite reasonably expect average FTP in the UK to be reported as higher than the USA.
I also searched the net a little and found the same article at another source penned by a different named author.
Dogtrousers
Kilometre nibbler
I actually doubt that. I doubt that they are the average for anything. So there's not point feeling good or bad about them.
The figures given are worthless nonsense. I doubt that there is any real underlying data. They have just been copied from somewhere, which copied them from somewhere else and so on. Eventually they may have originated from a study, or more than likely they were guesstimated.
alex_cycles
Veteran
- Location
- Oxfordshire
It's not categorised by age, but here is some REAL Strava data from a credible publication
https://www.cyclingweekly.com/fitness/training/13-ways-increase-average-cycling-speed-144937
https://www.cyclingweekly.com/fitness/training/13-ways-increase-average-cycling-speed-144937
Dogtrousers
Kilometre nibbler
And here's a distance breakdown for UK based Strava users Jan-Sep 2021. More here: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2021/12/strava-publishes-year-in-review-2021.html
There are probably more Strava stats if you can be bothered to search for them.
Of course this is all about the demography of Strava users. The speeds in the previous post are from 2016, so not the same data set, by the way.
There are probably more Strava stats if you can be bothered to search for them.
Of course this is all about the demography of Strava users. The speeds in the previous post are from 2016, so not the same data set, by the way.
Ming the Merciless
There is no mercy
- Location
- Inside my skull
Is that what you get out whenever you have a puncture?
Dogtrousers
Kilometre nibbler
It's for adding sealant I think
Rusty Nails
We remember
- Location
- Living in the slow lane
Which in itself is only an average of those people who are keen enough on cycling, and monitoring their performance, to use Strava, which is just a subset of cyclists and cannot be confused with average speed for cyclists.
All meaningless data, except it does give people an opportunity to boast that those figures cannot be right because their average is faster than that.
Dogtrousers
Kilometre nibbler
Not at all meaningless. It tells you the speeds of a specific subset of people calculated using a known algorithm over a known period of time. If that's what you want to know, great. If it isn't then the data is well enough defined to let you know this. It's quite the opposite of meaningless.
Rusty Nails
We remember
- Location
- Living in the slow lane
Meaningless as a chart in a thread about average speed of cyclists by age.
Otherwise I agree it is meaningful to a minority subset of cyclists not categorised by age
Incidentally, what a surprise to see The Netherlands, where a road passing over a railway line counts as a hill, as the fastest.
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