The phase of the 11-year galactic cosmic ray variation, due to a varying rate of emission of long-lived, propagating regions of enhanced scattering, travels faster than the scattering regions themselves. The radial speed of the 11-year phase in the quasi-steady force field approximation is exactly twice the speed of the individual episodic decreases. A time-dependent numerical solution for 1-GeV protons at 1 and 30 AU gives a phase speed which is 1.85 times the propagation speed of the individual decreases.