You roll out, settle into a rhythm, and glance down a few miles in. The average speed is sitting a touch lower than last week, so you push a little harder to drag it back up.
That number gets the final say on whether the ride was good. It shouldn’t.
Chasing that readout may be the exact reason it has stopped climbing. The fix costs nothing, and it starts with treating the number as what it actually is.
Why Your Average Speed Lies to You
Wind, hills, stops and company all move that number around while your fitness sits perfectly still.
Take a rider holding the same steady effort all day. On a calm, flat road they’d sit around 17 mph, by BikePush’s quick estimates. Put a 10 mph wind on the same out-and-back route and the average drops to about 16 mph.
Not because they got slower. Because about two-thirds of the riding time is spent into the wind, and the tailwind leg never pays it all back.
Hills are worse. Equal miles of 4% climbing and 4% descending at that same effort drop the ride to around 12 mph. The climb eats about 80% of the time, and the fast descent can’t undo it.
Then there’s the clock. Your app splits rides into moving time, which pauses when you stop, and elapsed time, which keeps running.
Add 10 minutes of lights and a café stop to an hour of riding at 16 mph, and the average drops to about 13.7 mph once the full clock is counted. Different apps draw that line differently, and GPS drift adds still more noise.
Ride in a group and the number climbs with no extra fitness at all. Drafting behind even one rider cut the oxygen cost by about 18% at 20 mph in one classic outdoor study.
Average speed is a summary of everything that happened around you, not a score for how strong you’ve become. If you want the metrics worth tracking, they’re the ones that change for better reasons.
💡 I don’t show average speed on my head unit. It’s not a good metric to go by, because hills and wind vary so much from ride to ride.
🏟️ In my opinion, the only place average speed really means something is an indoor velodrome. Or an indoor trainer.
Cost 1: You Start Too Hard
We’ve all done it. The ride opens flat and fast, so we go out hot to bank a good number early. Later, the legs pay for it.
A lab study put seven male cyclists through a 10-mile simulated time trial.
Their first mile averaged 14% more power than their whole-ride average, then dipped below it as they faded. When the same riders tried two other pacing styles, one perfectly even and one that matched power to the wind, both finished about 10 to 12 seconds faster at the same average power.
A separate trial pointed the same way over a 12.4-mile (20 km) time trial. Starting the first four minutes 15% below the self-chosen pace produced a faster finish than starting 15% above it.
These were small groups of trained men in a lab, so treat the exact seconds as a rough pointer. Start easier than feels right, spend your effort on climbs and into the wind, and back off when the road turns quick.
Cost 2: You Never Ride Easy
When the number is always on screen, a gentle spin starts to feel like wasted mileage. So you lift the pace until every ride lands in the same medium-hard middle.
The 80/20 idea means keeping most riding easy and a little hard, with almost nothing in between. In one cycling trial, 12 trained cyclists gained more peak power, lactate threshold and high-intensity capacity on an 80/20 plan than on a threshold-heavy one, despite doing fewer hours.
That result comes with a caveat. A larger 2025 analysis pooling 348 athletes found no overall difference in aerobic fitness or time-trial results between polarized (80/20) and pyramidal plans.
A pyramidal plan is mostly easy riding, some moderate and a little hard. Recreational athletes may get more from that version.
The threshold-heavy plan, with the most time in that middle zone, came off worse in the cycling trial. That middle zone is where chasing the number quietly parks you.
Read together, the plans that did well had one thing in common: they all kept most riding genuinely easy.
Keep your easy rides easy enough to chat, and save the hard stuff for separate hard sessions. We’ve covered the 80/20 approach in depth before, including the Stöggl and Sperlich study behind it.
Cost 3: You Stop Riding Hills
Once you know how a climb butchers the average, the flat roads start calling. It’s easy to stop signing up for the hilly loop, or the club ride with the long drag in the middle.
That protects the number and may cost you fitness. A hill forces sustained harder work in a way flat cruising doesn’t, then gives you the descent to recover.
Skip hills every week and you give up that work. That’s our read rather than a lab finding.
The same habit hides in segments, the short timed stretches of road inside ride apps. They use elapsed time and reward exactly that go-hard instinct. For the joy side of it, we’ve written about whether tech is killing the joy.
A simple rule: let most rides keep their hills and their easy pace.
What to Do Instead
You don’t need a new training plan, just a different number or none at all.
Hide the field on the rides where it changes how you ride.
Keep recording, so the data is still there if you want it later. The screen just stays quiet. If you’re not sure whether a bike computer still earns its place without that readout, we’ve covered whether you need a bike computer at all.
Judge effort instead of speed.
The easiest gauge, the talk test, needs no gadget. A 2004 lab study of 16 healthy volunteers found the point where talking first starts to get hard lines up almost exactly with the first threshold, on a bike as well as on a treadmill.
That first threshold marks the upper edge of easy riding. Keep your easy rides below it, where chat stays comfortable.
👍 Power meters are great, but a heart rate monitor is fine for most riders.
Heart rate and feel are too coarse for fine pacing in a time trial, the 10-mile study’s authors note, and that’s where power earns its keep. But for keeping easy rides easy and hard rides separated, they’re plenty.
Start the first 10 minutes easier than feels right.
That leaves you the legs to ride the second half properly.
🔁 I ride several different loops and out-and-backs, and I don’t measure average speed on any of them.
If you do want a way to compare rides, pick one fixed loop and use that. Same route, similar wind, and note how it felt or what your heart rate said, not just the time. It’s a practical rule, not a lab test.
Average Speed Questions Cyclists Keep Asking
What is the 80/20 rule in cycling?
It means spending about 80% of your riding time genuinely easy and about 20% hard, with very little in the middle. The research isn’t unanimous, but the plans that did well in studies kept most riding easy. The never-ride-easy section above walks through the evidence.
What’s a good average cycling speed?
There’s no honest single number. Wind, hills, stops and drafting can swing it by several mph from one ride to the next, with no change in fitness.
Compare yourself with yourself on the same route. If you still want a rough yardstick, we’ve outlined typical commuting speeds elsewhere.
How do you raise your average speed?
Start easier, keep easy rides easy, stop avoiding hills, and add some hard efforts. The quickest win is pacing, because it needs no extra fitness: even and wind-matched pacing in the 10-mile lab study finished about 10 to 12 seconds faster at the same average power.
Our guide to ways to bike faster covers the practical side.
Next ride, hide the field, start easy, and notice how the ride actually felt when you got home. That feeling is the metric worth collecting.
Know a rider who can’t stop checking their average speed? Share this with them👇
