My bike buddies and I have been doing fairly hard 3-5 hour Saturday morning rides for almost 20 years. As we’ve gotten older, the rides have gone from averaging 60 miles to more like 40 miles. But in terms of TSS, I’m still looking at 250 TSS on these rides, which results in multiple red/yellow days. Plan Builder wants me to do more like 100 TSS in the group ride. I’m not interested in doing shorter rides or riding with a slower group, so I’m thinking that an e-bike with power pedals is the best way stick with the group ride but limit TSS. I probably don’t need much assist to offset the extra bike weight and significantly lower TSS. Is anybody out there using this strategy successfully?
BTW, this also raises the question of how to introduce e-bikes into an established group of semi-purists, but I’ll leave that for another post!
With the ebike though, a potential hardware issue will be gearing and motor speed. Most E-bikes off the shelf wont offer much at group ride pace, but they would help on hills.
Depends on where you live. In Europe, e-bikes will only assist up to 25 kph, which means that you can use the assist on the uphills and are on your own on the flats. Flat pace is more about aerodynamics than weight though, so you shouldn’t feel too much of a penalty with the e-bike over your current one, except possibly for gearing, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a road bike anyway (looking at something like Trek Domane+ or the likes for reference). I’d say go for it, since your average speed indicates that you spend enough time below 25 kph where the bike can help.
While I haven’t done this personally, I’ve seen Syd&Macky (youtube channel, pro MTB racer couple) ride e-bikes on their easy days to keep things restful.