It helps to know your geeks from your wheel-suckers

Generally I like the company of other cyclists. I happily spend the majority of my working and social life with them. Despite other differences – taste in music, political views and so on – I find cycling is a great leveller and when riders get together they will happily get along amicably, chatting about their passion for hours.

That ardour can sometimes spill over into eccentricities and annoying quirks, mind you, and here are just a few that I have encountered over the years (and yes, I may have been guilty of some of them on occasion). The half-wheeler: the unscientific term for riding slightly ahead of your fellow rider (usually half a wheel’s worth) when two-abreast. It means your riding partner speeds up to come alongside you, but as they do so you speed up slightly again. Unchecked this ends up as a full-on race.

The numbers geek rider: we all know one, usually a time-trialist, who revels in all the data they can summon. It used to be limited to heart rate numbers, but now with the advent of affordable power meters, Strava and other technology the world is their oyster.

Once, on a ride around France and Italy, a rider in our group took his laptop to the dinner table every night to show anyone who was interested the correlation of his heart rate and power curve on each col that he rode up.

A short chat about functional threshold power can be interesting, but two hours into a ride and you may just want to push them into a ditch.

The excuse maker: usually turns up to a ride armed with a long-list of excuses. He didn’t sleep well last night, she’s hungover, he hasn’t been training and so on. They then proceed to rip everybody’s legs off as soon as the ride starts. On such occasions it is best to let them get on with it and see them at the café stop. The wheel sucker: “sitting-in” if you are tired and unable to contribute any more to the pace-setting of a group is acceptable. In such cases, sheltering behind your fellow riders can make a huge difference to the energy reserves you have left but the wheel-sucker is a different beast entirely.

Like a limpet these riders sit behind the others revelling in the shelter afforded to them. They will refuse to come through and take their turn riding into the headwind.

Indeed, often the only time they take a chance at the front of the group is when there is a Strava segment on offer, then they shoot out of the bunch to take the glory in the mistaken belief they are Mark Cavendish, before returning to recover behind someone else again.

The “can you lend me a...?” rider: at the café stop they’ve forgotten to bring money with them, and when they get a puncture they don’t have a spare tube or pump. In fact it’s a surprise they have managed to remember to turn up at all.

There are of course plenty of other “characters” but as long as we are riding safely their trivialities usually go down as amusing anecdotes.

The great strength of cycling is that it attracts people from all walks of life and for me it is that variety of camaraderie that makes it such an enjoyable activity.