A day of climbs

First off, a great article on Pezcycling.com today. I think it is likel something that every cyclist who is even half-serious about training contends with at one time or another.

With my first Century ride coming up on Monday, if the weather co-operates, I've been trying to get some quality rides in but not overtaxing myself too much. Today was originally supposed to be a 1 hour endurance ride but the forecast for tomorrow is not looking all that good so I swapped my 1 hour ride today with my 2 hour ride tomorrow. Plus, I just felt like going for a longer ride.

So today I went on an ecclectic route, pretty much riding wherever I felt like going, which took me some places I hadn't ever been before and some I hadn't been this year. The route ended up with a number of significant climbs (>4% grade) with one really steep climb (average over 11%). None of these climbs were particularly long, the longest being 1.8 miles or 10 minutes. They did give me a total of nearly 2500' of climbing over the course of the 41.78 miles covered today. A summary of the climbs is below.

Climb	Length	Avg. Gradient	Altitude Change
Mountain View Farm	1.07 miles	5.6%	315'
Lily Pond Road	.7 miles	5.0%	197'
Severance Hill	1.29 miles	4.4%	318'
South Main Street	.47 miles	4.5%	108'
Crow Hill	.35 miles	12.9%	220'
Home	1.8 miles	4.2%	387'

Note that the climb listed as Home in the table above is the climb I do every day that I come home from the east, and cover almost every time I commute to work on my bike. I say almost as last night I came back up over Crow Hill, which actually continues on beyond what is shown here to become a 1.6 mile climb averaging 6.6% and rising 567'.

Now I have two light days, a 1 hour endurance and 1 hour recovery ride, in the next two days before I go for my Century. I'm not terribly concerned about finishing the century as I've done 80+ mile rides already. It is more a question of how fast I can do the ride, especially given the relatively flat profile of this particular course. (See a profile of a big chunk of the course in my post for Saturday 6/17.)