Originally Posted by RMoudatir

I just realized that the group ride I went to was the advanced group ride though they seemed very forgiving I would expect an advanced group ride to ride at 23 mph+. I found that there is also an Intermediate group.

The odd thing is how am I supposed to bonk within 20 miles of hard riding? I did a 5 mile ride to the train station early in the morning then took the train to the closest point from the meet up point and I realized I had just 50 minutes to ride 13/14 miles to the meetup before the 8 am deadline. I did like a 13.5 mile time trial and ended up with barely 5 minutes to spare. So that should have been a decent warm up before the group ride I assume. The group ride starts and in the first mile I feel strong and think I can handle this but by mile 3-4 I start feeling hopeless knowing I cannot sustain that pace for another 45-50 miles it soon started to feel like sprinting giving it my all by mile 5 and the harder I went the bigger the gap became. I was cooked by then, I felt like this was one of the biggest failures in cycling I had I even felt a bit ashamed to come back again to the same group ride. The weird thing is that I had been able to keep a 20 mph solo pace for 7 miles on some rides and this group ride was slower with me at the back of the pack and I still failed pretty bad, I would have expected at least 15 miles before I get dropped but 5 miles?