Just. Average. Joe.

A million years ago, we had these Avocet computers that were ground breaking.  There were as small as a Garmin, a wire dangled down to a sensor on your fork, reading a magnet attached to your spokes.  Bam!  We had speed, distance and average speed.  What did you average man?!

That was the question, the mark.

We’d go out for a ride and it was all about the average speed.

Easy ride, keep it under 16.

Hard ride, keep it over 23.

And everything in between.

Michael Marckx reminded me of this a few weeks back.  I asked him how fast Swami’s Wednesday Worlds is on the way back south.  His answer: I try and average 23 miles an hour for my entire ride – warm up, ride, cool down.

That’s fast.

I’d forgotten all about that metric, didn’t even have the data field on my Garmin.  It got me thinkin’, so I looked up my average speed last Saturday (19.9) and my race the previous Saturday (20.2)… that includes the warm up and cool down.

Way under 23, but… I’m just an average Joe.