@ivandobski – hills are the death of teamwork !.
I hope I didn’t contribute to the dropping out – for whatever reason I cannot hold a consistent pace up a hill, the technique that works for me on short hills is to hit them very hard at the bottom, hold it as long as I can, and then cruise at the top until we regroup, eg on the rise out of the tube line I was first over the top whilst being one of the weaker riders in the group overall, but I got some recovery time.
I’ve found that on group rides if you are rider who comes over the top last you do not generally get any recovery – because everyone is kind of waiting for you, and that leads to you being dead after the hill and struggling for a while.
I prefer to go harder initially and get a little recovery time.
Better obvs would be to organise and agree before hand to give the last over the top riders some recovery time if they need it before the pace goes back up, that way you know you are going to get back on without immediately getting dropped again.
One other thing is that we were never lined out very often, which is the most efficient use of effort, but very difficult to do. You need to have a nominated line order and a 2m gap, so everyone knows where they should be. That takes practice at lower power levels before you can do it at higher levels.
That said – last night was probably the quickest I’ve ridden – so what do I know !.
