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feature
8 reasons to join a cycling club October 20188 reasons to join a cycling club + how to find the right one for you
Clubs are the backbone of the cycling scene and community, and an invaluable source of knowledge and advice that can help you improve as a bike rider. Here are some more reasons why you should join one, and some tips on finding the right club for your riding style.
You don't have to sign up and join a club straight away to ride with one. Most clubs will let you come on a ride or two before requiring you to join, so you can find out of you enjoy their company. Contact the club secretary to find out exactly how this works for any particular club.
When you turn up, be prepared just as you would for a solo ride, with water, food, spare tubes and tools, and follow instructions from the rider leaders.
Here’s why you should club together.
Meet like-minded riders
VC Walcot hill climb.jpg, by ([url=https://www.flickr.com/photos/anthonygrimley/]CC BY-NC 2.0 Anthony Grimley[/url])
Clubs have personalities so finding one that matches your interests is a great way to meet like-minded riders. Some clubs are just about riding; the Sunday club ride is the focus of the club’s activities. Others are centred on racing, while your local CTC group will likely be dedicated to pootling around the most obscure lanes the ride leader can find to connect pubs and cafes.
The larger the club, the more varied its activities are likely to be. For example, Chippenham Wheelers, one of the UK’s largest clubs, has five clubruns each weekend for different fitness levels, a Wednesday evening time trial every week during the summer, audax rides, training sessions at Castle Combe circuit and lots more.
New roads and routes
Fed up of repeating the same old rides every time? There are plenty of Google Maps-based routing sites and apps that can help you find a new ride, but that can be a bit hit-and-miss — I once ended up on a byway following a route generated by CycleStreets. That was kinda fun, but the 23mm tyres I was on weren’t really suitable for trail riding.
Club ride leaders are expected to keep a ride on suitable roads, which means knowing the back lanes and quieter B roads, so a clubrun is a great way to add to your repertoire of rides and get a feel for an area.
Cafe expertise
Every good clubrun includes a cafe stop. That makes social club rides a great way to find out who does the best lemon drizzle cake among the cafes within riding range.
Racing
Sure you can join British Cycling as a private member and rock up to the start of a Cat 4 race, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you’ll almost certainly get blown out the back of the group quickly. If you do manage to hang on you’ll likely be a danger to yourself and others if you don’t know how to ride in a high-speed group.
A racing-orientated club will have coaches and training sessions that will help you get fit enough you don’t get spat off the back of every race, and build the skills to handle a bike and position yourself safely even though you’re almost touching shoulders with other riders.
Companionship
When the weather turns cold, having clubmates to ride with can help maintain your motivation (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 reid.neureiter (link is external) (link is external) (link is external) (link is external))
You might like riding alone, and that’s fine, but club rides give you the chance to chat while you whizz along, and they’re one of those rare social situations where you won’t be considered odd for wittering on about bikes.
Being in a group is also invaluable if things go wrong. You should have spares, tools, food and drink with you anyway, but if you suffer a significant mechanical the chances are there’ll be someone in the group to fix it.
A well-run clubrun will usually have a ‘no rider left behind’ policy. Fitter riders might get a bit frisky on hills, but they’ll wait for the group to reassemble at the top. If you’ve over-reached a bit, and the ride turns out to be further than you can manage comfortably, you’ll get help in the form of a wheel to follow or even a helping hand up hills.
This usually doesn’t apply to chaingangs, though, but the incentive of not getting dropped is a great inspiration to dig deep into your reserves.
Training
A club track day can be the cheapest way to have a go at velodrome riding (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 P_Dean (link is external) (link is external) (link is external) (link is external))
As mentioned above many clubs run training sessions. These can be a high-speed on-road ‘chain gang’; more structured sessions on an off-highway circuit; or a room full of turbo trainers at a gym or community centre.
Being able to tap into coaching expertise is a big advantage of a club, whether your aim is to get into racing, take it more seriously or just to move up from Silver to Gold standard in your favourite sportive.
Skill building
Riding with a club is a good way to learn useful road skills. It’s a bit circular, as they’re mostly the skills you need to ride in a group, such as warning of hazards and following a wheel, but anything that teaches you finer bike control is a good thing.
Discounts
Many bike shops offer discounts either to members of associated clubs or to members of the CTC or British Cycling, organisations that many club members also join. On line, Chain Reaction gives 10 percent off to British cycling members and Cotswold Outdoor has 15 percent off for CTC members.
Cycling clubs and riding groups
Want to have a go at time trials? A club's evening race is the best place to start (CC BY-NC 2.0 Sebastian Lomas (link is external) (link is external) (link is external) (link is external))
British Cycling lists its 1,700 affiliated clubs in its Club Finder.
Cycling UK also has a comprehensive listing of affiliated clubs and local groups
If you want something more informal than traditional cycling clubs, there are lots of cycling groups to be found on sites like MeetUp or on various social media platforms.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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78 comments
So fucking true. TTs are the way forward.
Every club has its twat though, the guy who turns up on the intro/leisure ride and moans at it going 13mph average and only 30 miles.
Wonderful contribution.
its a fair point IMO...if they are going to do 8 reasons to join a club, there are at least 8 reasons not to join a club as well, and that would have been reason #1 on my not joining list
Therefore it is up to the senior members of the club to acknowledge a new rider, introduce themselves and assess the ability of the rider. This will enable either the new rider or the senior member to place them in the correct ride level. The result, stable groups, happy riders.
On the flip side it also stops new rider who thinks they are excellent at cycling jumping on to a fast group and then having to be carried for the majority of the ride. As with all things cycling, communication is the key. A simple introduction and pre ride conversation can often alleviate potential issues.
Exactly. This is precisely what a club I approached did. When I pointed out that I owned only a hybrid, was over 50 and had been cycling for only a few months on a short commute, he politely advised that I would be unlikely to keep up and suggested another club in the area. Fair enough. I thanked him for his time and that was that. I really don't see why an established club should have to modify its activities to suit a single individual.
As someone who sort of runs a sort of club (no committee meetings or anything but lots of riding together) I think the question of how much the club can or should modify its activities for an individual is the crux of the question. If a club is huge with various groups going out a different speeds then it should be relatively straightforward to place a new member in the right group.
Smaller clubs like ours will really struggle with that though as we have either one or two groups going out. For most of us the Sunday ride is a big part of the week and the core of the group ride together regularly and manage a good pace. Of course we want to attract new members and not discourage people, but it's hard to do that without frustrating the group a bit.
The irony is, and this genuinely bothers me- is that having sort of set the club up when I was a beginner, if I was to come along now at the level that I was at then, I would really struggle with the rides that we do. Thankfully we are now more regularly getting a slower group going out but that is not always happening. Don't underestimate how hard it is to keep everyone happy all the time!
Sorry, duplicate post
There are idiots everywhere. Joining a cycling club doesn't mean you have to ride with one any more than if you don't. I suggest you trade in your tired old stereotype for a more modern one.
it doesn feel like an old stereotype when I see them out on their club runs and Ill see the main group pass at rapid pace, and then a little later the small splits of people in shiny new gear desperately trying to keep up with the group following on, and most of them look thoroughly fed up and disheartened by the experience.
whether the group leader loses control,or its a test of mettle as one of my friends on her 1st club social run was told when she was deliberately dropped, or something else I dont know.
maybe Im just unlucky all the clubs round me are populated by the idiots, but enough people from all kinds of diverse geographic areas often feedback similar tales.
I get that some people are over ambitious and may end up picking the wrong groups to ride in, but the solution for clubs isnt then to run them as closed shops only open to pro level fitness/speed riders.
Unfortunately this is what happened last week at my clubs 'noobie' ride. What was meant to be a steady ride ended up at intermidiate speeds and kept dropping 4 riders off the back. I was one of those as I was recovering from an injury and a chest infection, another was also club member who was on his first time out after a broken collarbone and the other two were new.
What added to it was as soon as the four of us caught up at stop points, the guy leading would want to roll out immediately, not allowing us time to recover or feed.
I ended up dropping off the group and taking a different route back and will email the secretary the complain about the guy.
If I was a new person, I definitely wouldnt go back, and ironically, I spoke with some of the new riders about why they had chosen to ride with us, their replies were that they had emailed other clubs and the attitude was "be able to ride at this speed or we'll drop you".
Seems like you and the other recovering club rider could have made the decision to split your group of 4 and ride back together at your own pace.
Not exactly going for a club ride though is it, if you have to limp back home with a few others who the club couln't be arsed to wait for?
There's nothing like a bit of victim blaming.
wow, really?
I'm not saying they should have split off because they couldn't keep up with the group. I'm saying that since the group were not being reasonable, to the point where he preffered to ride back solo, he might have enjoyed the ride back more with the other three, they probably would have enjoyed it more too.
I've been with my club for around 3 years now and always look forward to the weekend rides.
I'm not sure how clubs on a Sunday club ride are arrogant though. In my opinion, my own club is friendly to all other cyclists (whether they are alone or riding with another club) and I'd say most clubs are friendly in return (whether I'm on a club ride or riding on my own).
They say in poker that there is a sucker at everytable, and if you can't identify him, it means it's you.
Does the same apply here? If you can't identify the club twat, then... ?
Yeah, 1 whining twat and a whole bunch of narcissists pretentious supposedly superior "alpha" males.
"I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."
Groucho Marx
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