Half-iron relay: bike leg

I was the bike leg of a relay for a half-iron this last weekend, and had an amazing bike that greatly exceeded expectations.

This is awesome, because I'd been a little anxious that my current bike plan of prioritizing friendship and bonding for long rides was going to have a negative impact on my ability to reach my IM bike goals. But the results from Saturday helped me feel good about keeping the hard work hard, and the easy work very easy.

So, back to those expectations. How did I set those?
I am a data junky, and have years of Garmin files from bike rides. I've found feet of elevation gain per mile to be a good normalization factor, so I've made some plots to answer the following question:

By year, for rides over 30 miles, what was the relationship between speed achieved and the climbiness of the ride?

I've broken it down by year, but re-started the data collection on 2013, when I started riding a carbon-fibre road bike, vs my older aluminum one.

Also, I wanted to separate my 2013 results from the 2014 results, since I purposefully dropped weight throughout 2014.

Here's the data I've collected over the last 2+ years:

Speed vs. Climbiness for bicycling

From this chart, using last year's line, I had a notion that for the course I was going to do this weekend, at around 30 feet/mile of climbiness, I should expect something around 14mph.

As you can see from the little blue dot hanging out up in the sky, I actually came in much closer to 16mph, which was amazing! But also a little nerve-wracking, since I was part of a relay and was worried the runner wouldn't be expecting me yet.

As it turns out, everything worked out fine, and I am going to continue treating most long rides as wonderful time with friends. I'll check in again with an individual brick workout in mid-June to verify that this plan is still working.