Originally Posted by
asgelle
Or heart rate is highly individual dependent. With a threshold heart rate around 173, I can ride at 158 all day.
This misses the point. In a group ride you should be going over and under the avg HR depending on how long and how often you pull. You can infer what I did because you know it's a group ride and you know you typically have time on front and time sitting in to average out.
I'm not arriving at the idea by thinking 158bpm is high. I'm arriving at that knowing it is an average of higher and lower numbers.
Even if they pulled half the entire ride, they'd have to be a good bit over 158 when pulling to bring the average up to 158 from the HR they were at sitting in.
Think about for a second if you assumed they only pulled for 1/4 of the ride how high their HR during a pull would have to be. Pretty darn high.
The only logical conclusion (to me) is either lots of pulling or having a hard go at it one way or another.