TheRef

On my long rides (60+ mile) I like to take the first miles very light as a warm up and to get out of my subdivision and when returning I take it very slow as a cooldown. We are talking 10-12mph. My subdivision leads me to a country roads and within a few miles it's open corn fields and I bring the pace up 17-20mph, Until I hit a few small towns where I have to slow down again to 12-15mph to navigate their "busy" downtown/main street areas.
So while most of my ride I'm above 17-18mph my total moving speeds are dramatically reduced and it ends up being on the 15-16mphs (14ish when " trafic" is bad on the small towns). Also the amount of warm up/ coold down I do can impact the final moving speed of the ride.

Other than bragging rights with friends that think I'm slacking I use those long rides to gauge the effort for the day. I've tried to crop out parts of the ride and I end up with multiple segments over 18mph but I'd like to keep a single file.
Anybody knows of a software that would let me " neutralize" certain parts of a ride and still give me the overall moving average for the rest of the ride??

corrado33

Easiest way I can think of is just to turn auto-pause on below 13 MPH, that's cheating though.

Seattle Forrest

Or hit the lap button when you leave your suburb, cross through towns, etc. Then look at numbers from every other lap, the ones with bigger numbers.

I'd also recommend using heart rate or power to judge your efforts, instead of speed.

caloso

Just treat them as different rides. When you get to the end of the trafficy part, hit stop, reset, and restart. Repeat on the way back. Now you have three rides: 2 slow ones, and 1 fast one.

RPK79

I was going to say 10 MPH, but 13 works too.

PepeM

No pause button?

Alasdair

Create segments for those unhindered parts of the ride and use them as your gauge.

[edit] Just saw your desire to keep a single file/ride.

caloso

Sorry, I missed the part about keeping it a single file. In that case, use the lap button.

bbbean 

Average speed isn't that useful a metric, for the reasons you note above, but if you ride the same route very often, it's not taht gard to compare one ride to another. Consider getting a power meter, then you will be able to compare apples to apples.

RJM

It seems like many of the people around me are really concerned with their average speeds when it comes to certain routes so I see them hitting the lap button on their garmins right after we begin riding and right before we end when we are doing warm ups/cool downs. Then, when they get on strava they have three rides to my one, and my "average speed" is always lower. I guess if I cared enough about it I would start hitting that lap button but to me average speed means absolutley squat.

Seattle Forrest

It's amazing how much faster I got and I'm only riding half as much as before!

Seattle Forrest

If you scroll down (in Garmin Connect, I'm sure also in Strava and Training Peaks etc) to where it has "splits," between "stats" and "segments," it'll show the laps that make up a ride. You get pretty much all your stats broken out by lap, including normalized power. You still only have one ride, there's just more detail on how it breaks down if you care to have that. I don't think there's a downside other than having to hit the button.

When I do big climb rides, I'll hit lap at the top before I head down. So I have one lap for the ascent and another for the descent. Took me 2 hours and 180 watts to get to the top and 40 minutes and 106 watts to get down when I did Washington Pass recently.

on the path

Going faster on the fast sections will raise your overall average. HTFU already..

f4rrest

Kind of annoying to follow people in strava that split rides up like that. It spams my activities page.

TheRef

Agreed !!!

TheRef

The problem with that is that it won't register the distance covered while under that speed.

svtmike

So what? It's so slow you feel the need to neutralize it anyway.

My recommendation is to stop caring and own your numbers without caveat.

TheRef

Stop caring? About what really? I like to know how many miles I rode on a particular ride. I also like to know how fast I did when I was actually riding fast. That as far as it goes. I don't care much more than that.

MikeyBoyAz

If it's a garmin device you can have it trigger laps at GPS locations too. Just a thought.

Bacciagalupe

1) Use the lap feature. Manually pick the laps. Treat the laps like a "ride."

2) Stop caring about silly stuff. Seriously.

Moving average is a terrible way to measure your efforts. Variations in route, wind, temperature, stoplights all conspire to make it a pretty useless measure.

3) Since your real goal is to measure effort, get a power meter.

I'd start with a CycleOps PowerCal. It runs off of your heart rate, so it'll measure that too; it's very cheap ($50?); it works on any bike; takes zero effort to switch to another bike. It is definitely not accurate enough for training, but it is accurate enough to give you an idea of how hard you're working on a 60-mile ride.

If you really need something more accurate, get a real power meter.

DXchulo

If you're on Strava and you forget to hit the lap button, you can go to the "Analysis" tab and just click and drag on the elevation profile. It will give you data for the selected portion of the ride.

kbarch

How about splitting the difference? Just cut off only the first few "warm-up" miles. Either don't start tracking until you get going, or cut that segment off when you're finished. If it's a regular ride and you know it's always the same five or six miles or whatever, and you want to know your full total at some point, it's easy enough to just add that number back in as many times as you cut it out. If that doesn't do the trick, setting auto-pause at 4-6 mph would be reasonable for cycling, to cut out the bits where you crawl through traffic at a pedestrian's pace or dawdle around while taking a break (come to think of it, why haven't I done that already?).

PepeM

Auto-pause off, it is the only way to live.

pdedes

who has time for that ****?

Steve Jones Raw: Starting And Finishing A Marathon Doesn't Make You A Marathoner

woodcraft

I have a climbing out and back route that I sometimes do for time.

There is an obvious start/stop point that would eliminate the short town section, making it a more repeatable/shareable ride.

Apparently, it doesn't matter that much to me.

I have on occasion stopped the timer to eliminate the post-beer mile home in order to avoid dragging down a mph average that I'm happy with.