Cycling glossary
Plain-language definitions for terms used across Ride Planner and in the ride-planning world generally.
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- Bonking
- Running out of usable fuel mid-ride -- your muscles and brain run low on glycogen and effort suddenly gets much harder to sustain, often abruptly. Caused by burning more calories than you're taking in over a long enough stretch of time. See the heat and hydration guide for how Ride Planner estimates this risk.
- CdA (drag area)
- Frontal area times drag coefficient -- a single number describing how much of a "hole" a rider punches in the air. Lower CdA (a tucked position, tighter clothing, drafting behind another rider) means less aerodynamic drag at a given speed. See how a paceline changes it.
- Century / metric century / double century
- A one-day ride of 100 miles (a metric century is 100km, about 62 miles; a double century is 200 miles). See gran fondo vs. sportive vs. century for how this compares to other event formats.
- Checkpoint
- A point of interest, control, or waypoint along a route -- a rest stop, landmark, or turn -- shown with its distance and estimated arrival time. See the climbs and route cards guide.
- Cue sheet / route card
- A printable summary of a route meant to be glanced at mid-ride: distance and time for each checkpoint and climb, in order, rather than a full report.
- FTP (Functional Threshold Power)
- Roughly the highest power output, in watts, a rider can sustain for about an hour. Used as a baseline for expressing a target pace as a fraction of your own threshold rather than a raw wattage. See estimating ride time from power and FTP.
- Grade
- The steepness of a road, expressed as a percentage: rise divided by horizontal distance. A 5% grade climbs 5 feet for every 100 feet traveled. Sustained grades of 3% or steeper are what Ride Planner flags as climbs.
- Gran fondo
- Italian for "big ride" -- a long, organized, non-race ride that often keeps some competitive trappings (timing, age-group results) from its origins in Italian mass-participation races. See gran fondo vs. sportive vs. century.
- Headwind / tailwind component
- How much of the wind is blowing directly against you (headwind) or with you (tailwind), based on the wind direction relative to the direction you're actually heading -- as opposed to the wind's raw speed, which alone doesn't say how much it will help or hurt.
- Heat index
- A "feels like" temperature combining air temperature and humidity, since humidity limits how well sweat can evaporate and cool you. See the heat and hydration guide.
- Intensity
- A target effort expressed as a fraction of FTP -- an intensity of 0.7 means holding 70% of your threshold power, a common moderate pace for a long ride.
- Multi-day tour
- An organized ride spanning several days, usually point-to-point across a state or region, with baggage transport, camping or lodging, and meals built around the route -- RAGBRAI is the best-known example. See how this differs from single-day formats.
- Paceline (rotating)
- A group riding formation where riders take turns at the front (doing the full-drag work) and then rotate back to draft behind the others, sharing the aerodynamic effort across the group. See how a rotating paceline changes your numbers.
- Sportive
- The British and broader European term for essentially the same organized, non-race, mass-participation format a gran fondo describes. See gran fondo vs. sportive vs. century.