If you have a look through the blog posts on this site, I talk a lot about pacing on descents. This comes from both the research that I’ve done, and also coaching and my own racing.
Now that I’ve been linking the braking data over video, this kind of thing is really easy to view–you can literally see the measured differences!
Here are two videos I recently made.
The first one is a normal race run. I felt super fast! And the time was pretty quick. You can see my Flow Score and Drag Time at the end.
And here is the flowy run. My Drag Time was lower by 6 seconds and my Flow Score was the same as pedaling!
It was crazy that each run was the same time!
You can see that while all the extra pedaling made me go really fast in a few sections, I also had to add some more braking to stay in control. So really I took away all the extra speed I added, which was just a waste!