beng1

All of my rides are recovery rides because I quit riding to the point where I can not talk when I ride. The rides are recovering me from being sedentary, and they are a nice break or change from the rest of life and a lot of fun, so cycling will recover you from anything, even physical injury as long as you do not do it in an athletic way.

livedarklions

Friendly amendment to this post--when you break down the word "recreation", it's a pretty good indication of how much people value this form of recovery.

Carbonfiberboy 

I've tried all sorts of "recovery ride" theories. The only thing which works for me to actually recover is 30' of Z1 on my rollers. Anything more is less good. Back in the LA days, I recall his coach telling him to do a week of 1 hr. Z1 rides on his trainer between spring classics. So that's the young LA. I figure about a tenth of that should work for me.

caloso

Less than an hour, flat, Z1. If you have a PM, set a max power alert on your computer, as it’s easy to over do it.

Erzulis Boat 

My standard out/back recovery is 14.25miles, 165ft, and 85 watts or so. Takes around an hour.

tkamd73 

Riding back to get something I left at a stop, or going back to look for something I dropped along my route.
Tim

BlazingPedals

To me, it's an hour or so and HR below 115. No burn, no breathing heavy. It's very hard for me to do that while riding with a group because they always want to push too hard on the hills. As a result, recovery rides (for me) are usually solo.

pdlamb

A headwind can make a recovery ride difficult to plan or impossible. For instance, say I plan a recovery ride at 15 mph and 125 W. If I'm facing a 15 mph headwind and start out riding 15 mph, I'm blowing my power out of range, so I have to slow down. And probably slow down some more. Instead of riding 7 miles out and then looping home (for a one hour ride), the planned loop may take twice as long.

And of course, if the headwind is closer to 20-25 mph, I don't need to go anywhere -- I get all the aerodynamic resistance I need doing a trackstand. Of course, that kind of runs counter to the idea of active recovery in the first place...

rydabent

I dont do cycling that is so intense that I need a recovery ride. On the other hand if the weather cooperates, for my age 84, I find that riding every other day works great.

SpeedyBlueBiker

A recovery ride to me means a ride the next day after a hard or long effort. Can sometimes be both. If one day I rode a 75 mile hilly route at a fast pace the next day might be a recovery ride of say 35-45 flat miles.

delbiker1 

My Lazy Boy recliner.

Trakhak

I remember reading an interview with national road race champion Wayne Stetina in Bicycling! (or maybe Competitive Cyclist) in the late 1970s where he said proudly that his brother Dale had invented the post-race-day recovery technique of riding for an hour or so on flat terrain using only the bike's lowest gear. (That would probably have been a 44/21 for those guys, but still.)

There was a local very successful racer in Baltimore in the '80s I'd ride with occasionally. Before one ride started, Charlie told me that he was going to take it easy on this one. We went along at his pace for a while, and then I started subtly increasing the pace, as one does. I looked around after a minute, and Charlie was about 20 feet behind, meaning that he hadn't deviated even a little bit from his chosen pace.

That was the moment I realized what buffoons the rest of us local would-be racers were, invariably turning every "easy recovery ride" into a slam dance.

Finally, the old mantra---"Your easy rides are too hard, your hard rides are too easy"---made sense.

Nachoman

A super easy ride, the day after a very difficult, high effort ride.
I haven't done a recovery ride forever because my high intensity rides are Saturdays and I usually don't ride again until Wednesday.