Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

This is a good lead in to comment on the "fastest rides." When you order 
something there will be a fastest and a slowest, next fastest, next 
slowest, etc. I've gotten quite a bit of feedback about this wondering 
the reason a ride is one of the 50 fastest. Of course the "short ride" 
question comes up.

Then I get a few emails (from people other than Steph ) assuring me that 
the Oreana rides are not short:-).

There are many reasons a ride can be fast. It can be related to the 
course difficulty, the weather, the riders that show up, etc. What is 
important is how does the ride fit into the distribution of all the 
rides. When you take the ride speeds for all the rides and plot the 
number at a given speed, the plot will take on resemblance of a bell 
curve, a big bump in the middle (around the average ride speed of all 
the rides) and tailing off to fewer and fewer rides as you got away from 
the mean in both directions. This is the same bell curve most of us 
learned about in high school and the same one most of use were graded on 
in school.

If a ride has a speed that is too far away from the overall average ride 
time compared to the rest of the rides, then in just might be an 
"outlier" and warrant further investigation. An outlier is an event that 
with a given probability does not belong to the underlying population.  
In this case an outlier could very well indicate a short trail for that 
particular ride. The control theory people have developed a pretty 
robust theory to deal with outliers.

There has been no further analysis of the ride speeds to determine if 
there are any outliers. As soon as this recent crunch at work subsides I 
intend to look at that along with looking at any candidate outlier and 
analyzing how the riders in those rides (if any) rode other rides 
compared to the candidate ride.

So while the data on the fastest rides is "food for thought" more work 
is required to determine with any probability that a ride is "abnormally 
fast." If there are abnormally fast rides then it probably warrants 
further investigation to determine why.

Truman

John Teeter wrote:

> (p.s. I think Kathy's times were the ones which placed Oreana 
> Canyonlands on the fastest 50s list that truman put out.)



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