Group Rides

Ride 63 – Group Rides Between April and October Ride 63 organises group rides on a Tuesday evening (from Lochwinnoch), on a Thursday evening (from Beith) and most Sundays throughout the year, (often starting in Lochwinnoch but some are farther afield like the Clyde coast and islands). Sunday rides take place between November and March and are arranged on an ad hoc basis.

Our evening rides typically start at 6.30pm and last for 1½-2 hours, covering between 10-20 miles. Our Sunday rides typically start at 10am and last 3-4 hours and cover about 30-40 miles (with a café stop around the half way point). Occasionally we arrange longer, more challenging, rides that take 5-8 hours to complete and cover 60-80 miles and sometimes these take place in the hours of darkness.

The length, speed and difficulty (measured by number and steepness of hills) of our regular rides are dictated by the Ride Guide leading the ride and the riders who turn up. In other words, the Guide will have a route planned but will alter it if the weather conditions or the fitness (and/or enthusiasm) levels of the riders present on the day suggest they should.

People who have ridden with other clubs might be used to rides and groups being described in terms of average speeds but that doesn’t seem terribly useful for the rides we organise. We ride in a rather hilly area and because of the ethos of the club (each rider riding at their own pace and others waiting for them to regroup along the way) there can be a wide range of speed of individual riders while the average speed of the group remains the same. And because a lot of the hills involve short, sharp ascents and descents the speeds of individuals can be quite varied.

We very rarely ride a route without at least one challenging climb. It is possible to ride a nearly completely flat route using the old railway line turned into a SUSTRANS Route 7 linking Kilbirnie and Paisley via Lochwinnoch but this gets quite dull very soon so while we use the cycle path often we almost always branch off from it.

On average, the rides organised from Lochwinnoch involve more ascent than those from Beith, (though the latter might be a bit longer) and the terrain is very much undulating rather than flat. There may be quite a lot of climbing involved on our routes but they are typically shortish climbs with the longest on in the local area (from the Castle Semple Visitor’s Centre in Lochwinnoch to the Muirshiel Visitor’s Centre, following the route of the River Calder) being less than 5 miles in length and taking 20-30 minutes to complete by most of our club riders. Typically, most of the climbs we do don’t last for more than 5-10 minutes but we might two or three such climbs on a ride.