How far can I ride each day?

One of the hardest parts of planning a bikepacking trip is estimating how long a day will actually take and how far you will get. A route file gives you distance and climbing, but turning those numbers into hours and days is tricky. You don't want to be too pessimistic as that will cause you to carry more food than you need. Optimism on the other hand can be a complete disaster.

I summarized the day-by-day stats from four typical multi-day trips: 21 riding days in total, covering the Great Granby (Kootenays), the Alberni Bam Bam (Vancouver Island), the Sea to Tree Mini (Vancouver Island), and the Kamloops Grasslands Loop. My goals is to pull patterns from the data that will help me and others plan future trips. The raw data is appended to the end of this post.

My Riding Speed

Two of these trips were on my Santa Cruz Stigmata carbon gravel bike with 45 or 50mm tires. The other two were on my Salsa Timberjack hardtail mountain bike with 2.4" tires. My load on all of these trips was about the same and somewhere around 40 lbs (I need to confirm this). My average riding speed on the Stigmata was 17.4 kph and on the Timberjack 14.6 kph. Those differences cannot entirely be assigned to the bike however because the rides on the Stigmata were solo trips and the rides on the Timberjack were with others. Suffice to say, as a starting point 14 to 17 kph for gravel road / trail bikepacking is a reasonable starting point but it is dangerous to stop your assessment there. For example, the data these numbers come from were all rides with somewhere between 800 and 1500m of climbing per day (sometimes more). If you have a day with much more climbing you will be slower, obviously. Read on...

Fitness and Effort

Let's start with fitness, and the closely related topic of effort. I'll try to give you a sense for this. I'm, at the time of writing this, 63 years old and a lifelong multi-sport athlete who exercises pretty much every day. Last year I rode 14,000km. This year I'll ride less than that I think but more than 10,000km, I'm a strong rider for my age but I am not a super strong rider. When I am bikepacking I am not pushing hard. My moto is "be ready to ride tomorrow". I think this is the right approach as it makes the riding much more enjoyable and ensures you don't blow up in the middle of a long trip. My thinking is that the speed of 14-17kph is achievable I think for most people who are riding regularly and pushing themselves at least once a week over 100km with significant elevation gain.

Climbing

The data suggests that the amount of climbing is not a great predictor of average riding speed but that is probably just an artifact of this particular data set. Climbing with a loaded bike can be very slow. Let's look at some specific metrics. To give those of you local to Vancouver a specific metric - my ascent time on Mount Seymour on my road bike currently ranges from 50 minutes to an hour. That's a 12km climb gaining 900m (7.5% grade average) in elevation, that's 15 to 18 meters of elevation per minute or a climbing speed of 12 to 14 kph. But when I'm climbing with a loaded bike I am much much slower! Unfortunately I don't have good data on this but just from observing myself I know that on long climbs of 8-10% which is typical on logging roads in BC I am crawling along at about 5 kph. My only point here is to make sure you are looking at the terrain when you plan each day. If you have a 100km day with 3000m of climbing I would not assume you can do 14 kph fully loaded. It will be closer to 10 or less!

Obstacles

Most trips have some challenging sections where hike-a-bike is needed or you encounter some other non-riding sections. Hike-a-bike can be very very slow. A section where you can push your bike loaded you will still probably only cover 2 to 3 kph. You will also encounter places where you can't push your bike, you need to lift your bike or unload and carry your gear then your bike. On sections like that 1 kph is probably optimistic. So, be aware of the terrain. bikepacking.com does a great job with their routes trying to identify difficult sections. Then of course there are sections where you need to take a boat or a train or a plane and it probably goes without saying that you need to treat each of those segments, and hike-a-bike segments, as an entities unto themselves and not blindly bundle them into your 14-17kph estimate.

Elapsed Time

The data from these trips shows that my riding speed was pretty consistent (with the same bike) but my elapsed time had huge variation. The primary source of the variation was the fact that on two of the trips I was alone and approached each day as a ride with minimal stops. The other two trips I was with friends and we did a lot of stopping to enjoy points of interest. I have to say that the two trips with friends were both more enjoyable and more fulfilling when I think about them.

To be specific, my elapsed time for the rides with friends was 1.8x riding time (with some days as high as 3x) whereas my elapsed time solo was 1.3x riding time with a tighter range (1.1 - 1.4). What to do with this? This is very much a personal choice of course, it is just something to be aware of and for me as a rule of thumb I would assume 1.5. Keep in mind I'm not talking about racing. I'm talking about bike packing for the joy of being out there on the road and not under time pressure.

Guideline for Planning Distance and Time

Here is what I suggest as an approach to determining how many days you need for a particular trip.

1. If this is your first trip, do a speed test! You could make an assumption of say 15kph but without any personal experience that is probably a bad idea. My recommendation is to load up your bike as if you were going to do a multi-day trip and do a day trip or an overnighter to a location with low risk but somewhat representative of the type of riding you expect to be doing. By low-risk I mean if you don't make your destination it's no big deal, you can camp anywhere or you can call for a rescue. Use your average pace for that day as a baseline.

2. If the route you are planning is mostly smooth gravel or pavement relative to your test add 1-2 kph to your riding time.

3. Now you have your baseline speed. Let's assume it is 15 kph.

4. Start with an estimate of how far you think you can comfortable ride fully loaded in a day before fatigue takes over. Let's assume for this example that is 100km and 1,000m climbing. That works out to about 6.5 hours riding time.

5. Multiply that by 1.5 to get your elapsed time: Call it 10 hours.

6. Add any time you need for "obstacles". Let's say you need an extra 2 hours for some reason so now you are at 12 hours for the day.

7. Look at the elevations, is there much more climbing than "typical". Add more time for that if you think you need it. How many hours are you at now? Do you need to consider pushing harder (less breaks) to get the elapsed time down?

8. Look at the route plan, what early or later camp spots are there?

9. Iterate through the above until you have a plan the seems reasonable and then be prepared for nothing to go as planned.

Table of Raw Data

Trip (Bike Type)	Day	Distance	Climbing	Climb intensity (m/km)	Riding time	Riding speed	Elapsed time	Elapsed speed
Great Granby (MTB)	1	93 km	800 m	8.6	6.0 h	15.5 kph	10.5 h	8.9 kph
Great Granby (MTB)	2	53 km	1,000 m	18.9	4.0 h	13.3 kph	7.5 h	7.1 kph
Great Granby (MTB)	3	48 km	690 m	14.4	3.25 h	14.8 kph	8.5 h	5.6 kph
Great Granby (MTB)	4	67 km	1,040 m	15.5	5.0 h	13.4 kph	9.25 h	7.2 kph
Great Granby (MTB)	5	86 km	1,500 m	17.4	6.5 h	13.2 kph	10.75 h	8.0 kph
Great Granby (MTB)	6	82 km	740 m	9.0	5.5 h	14.9 kph	10.0 h	8.2 kph
Great Granby (MTB)	7	60 km	190 m	3.2	3.25 h	18.5 kph	4.75 h	12.6 kph
Alberni Bam Bam (MTB)	1	123 km	1,171 m	9.5	7.0 h	17.6 kph	9.5 h	13.0 kph
Alberni Bam Bam (MTB)	2	71 km	908 m	12.8	4.75 h	15.0 kph	7.5 h	9.5 kph
Alberni Bam Bam (MTB)	3	59 km	800 m	13.6	4.3 h	13.7 kph	8.3 h	7.1 kph
Alberni Bam Bam (MTB)	4	72 km	960 m	13.3	5.5 h	13.1 kph	8.25 h	8.7 kph
Alberni Bam Bam (MTB)	5	56 km	694 m	12.4	4.0 h	14.0 kph	12.5 h*	4.5 kph*
Alberni Bam Bam (MTB)	6	72 km	900 m	12.5	5.3 h	13.6 kph	9.0 h	8.0 kph
Alberni Bam Bam (MTB)	7	59 km	740 m	12.5	4.25 h	13.9 kph	5.3 h	11.1 kph
Sea to Tree Mini (Gravel)	1	59 km	600 m	10.2	3.0 h	19.7 kph	4.5 h	13.1 kph
Sea to Tree Mini (Gravel)	2	130 km	1,400 m	10.8	7.25 h	17.9 kph	9.5 h	13.7 kph
Sea to Tree Mini (Gravel)	3	140 km	2,100 m	15.0	8.5 h	16.5 kph	12.0 h	11.7 kph
Sea to Tree Mini (Gravel)	4	77 km	1,100 m	14.3	4.75 h	16.2 kph	6.5 h	11.9 kph
Kamloops Grasslands (Gravel)	1	60 km	1,200 m	20.0	3.5 h	17.1 kph	4.0 h	15.0 kph
Kamloops Grasslands (Gravel)	2	102 km	1,650 m	16.2	6.25 h	16.3 kph	7.75 h	13.2 kph
Kamloops Grasslands (Gravel)	3	109 km	1,575 m	14.4	6.1 h	17.9 kph	8.0 h	13.6 kph

* Day 5 of the Bam Bam includes the 4-hour Lady Rose boat transfer from Bamfield to Port Alberni which has a huge impact on the time and elapsed speed. When planning your expected progress you should always treat such outliers separately in your plan.