Originally Posted by
PeteHski
Maybe it's a language thing. But over here when people say they did a non-stop ride, it means they didn't stop for anything other than momentarily for traffic and maybe a very quick water bottle fill / pee on a longer ride. I rarely stop at all on my rides, which are anything from 1-9 hours long. It's just my strategy to get the best finish time. Most people stop at the feed stations for a break, while I just go by and eat on the move. Saves a good 5-10 mins and keeps the momentum going. Quite often have some interesting leap-frog battles with guys who are riding a little faster, but stopping a few times.
Anyway 9 hours is about my tolerance for not stopping, but my average endurance rides are more like 4-5 hours. The 130 km event I did last weekend took 4.5 hours and according to Strava I stopped for less than a minute in total (due only to the accumulation of traffic junctions).
Heck, if you look at the OP, it just asks "how long is your average bike ride". I don't even know if that's average distance, time, or what. Assuming fairly level terrain and neutral wind conditions, there's a whole hell of a lot of difference in fitness required to cover 130km in 4.5 hours vs. say 50km in the same time.
Using your definition, I did a lot of non-stop 100 mile rides (6-6.5 hours, usually) last year for the simple reason that there was nowhere good to take a nice indoor break at. Quite a few of those were done without bathroom or water refill breaks, but I could only pull that off when the weather was relatively cool so the water requirements were relatively low.
I'm really not interested in riding around a closed track again and again to do 100 miles without any traffic stops--I think that's the only way that could be done around here.
Anything over 100 miles, I want a nice lunch break of an hour or so.
I don't think it's going to come as any kind of shock that cycling doesn't do much for people's upper-body "fitness". This thread has absolutely no point.