A battle with my average speed on a ride to start a new month

May. A new month. A chance to get back into the grove. I didn't get a lot of miles in through April which is understandable given the birth of little Zoë, who gives perfect reasons to stay home after a long day at work, but now that we're both getting the hang of this 'being a parent' thing, I'm starting to find that a few days a week I can squeeze a ride in after work.

With that in mind I hope to get more miles in through May to make up for what I didn't do in April. I'm not about to starting knocking out 1000 miles a month like some people seem to have an unlimited supply of time to achieve, but perhaps two or three hundred for the month would be a good start. As May goes on we should get more time up at the lake and with those trips I hope to spend the mornings out on the country roads getting miles in uninterrupted from traffic lights.

My ever becoming beloved Toronto Blue Jays had a so-so month of April when it came to being productive. After a superb training camp that seen them get into the right shape they went through April 12-11 with the bats really letting them down. May however brought a new month and a chance to catch up. They started it with a 8-7 win over the best team in Baseball, the Texas Rangers, and followed it up a day later against the same team with a 11-5 victory. Undefeated (two games, I know) in May heading on a West coast road trip to Anaheim, California, and the batting department of the team finally coming alive.

So much like the Jays and their baseball season, I'm out to really kick start my cycling season with the arrival of May. With that in mind on May 1st I took the road bike out for it's first spin in a while putting in just shy of 20 miles around the Etobicoke area, on suburban streets and park paths in my best effort to avoid as many traffic lights as possible. Naturally that forced me to run into stop signs and so I never truly got into a good flowing rhythmn. But that's part of the territory of city riding and you get used to it... besides the stop/start of it all is like a form of interval training.

When I started my ride and clicked GO on the Garmin the timer, to my dismay, started up. I had it set not to record under 5mph so that my average speed wouldn't be skewed by traffic lights and other uncontrolable slowdowns, but for some reason it was ticking over while I was still putting on my right glove. I hit stop, but twenty some seconds had elapsed with an average speed of 0mph.

You see, I'm a sucker for my average speed. At least when I'm training. It isn't that I care how fast it is, but that it accurately reflects the effort I put in. On the old computer I used prior to going Garmin, I got frustrated no end when I would see my average speed of 17.4mph plummet to under 17mph every time I slowed down at a traffic light. A 50 yard slowdown would inevitably take a good mile of faster riding to make up. So when the Garmin came with a speed calculation cutoff, I was tempted to set it at anything under 14mph though settled for 5mph when I accepted there were plenty of hills I wouldn't be going up at close to 14mph.

Anyway. By the time I did get going it was a couple of miles into the ride at speeds pushing 20mph and the average speed was still sixteen point something. Sometimes I need to tell myself to relax and enjoy the ride and ignore the average speed, but it nags at me regardless. So my nice spin in the suburbs of Toronto turned into a race to push my speed to a level I thought appropriate for the ride I wanted to do. I suppose that kind of training doesn't hurt.

I was satisfied with it in the end after a fast blast through one park, though naturally I got home and wondered what it might have been had it not been recording idly for twenty seconds at the beginning. I'm sad like that really.

Details from Garmin Connect:

And Strava: