Absolutely. Pretty much the very first thing I noticed doing any sort of distance when I first got the Raven Sports Tour (being a bit out of shape at the time) was how much less tired I was becoming than expected, despite my initial distance outings all being coincidentally undertaken in pretty windy conditions and having flat handle bars.
I initially thought that this was largely down to the quality of the frame, but during my recent stint in Andalucia, I noticed that more I was using the gears significantly more than I would with a normal derailleur, regardless of the terrain and wind or no wind. I attribute this to ease of use of the Rohloff. The absolute certainty of finding your gear (and the right gear!) everytime simply makes me want to use it more, finetuning the process of maintaining cadence and unnecessarily expending energy.
Ironically, I've yet to achieve a day's riding in which I've surpassed timewise what I would normally expect to achieve but have definitely completed a number of journeys that i think I would have struggled to complete on my old hybrid.
