How many climbs in a 31 mile ride?

Today's workout was something a little different, at least for me. The description of the workout reads: "BT: On a course with long & short hills. On long climbs stay in the saddle at CP12. Attack very short hills at CP1. "

So what does this mean? Well, in my case it means that longer climbs I need to go around 310W or thereabouts and for short climbs it is more of a sprint at around 500W. Now, the description doesn't say how long is long and how short is very short, so I went with my own judgement, which was:
Very short climb- a rise which takes less than 30 seconds to climb
Long climb- a rise which takes more than 30 seconds to climb
I'm not sure this is what the workout really means, but that is how I did it, with some very interesting results. First off, this workout gave me my highest normalized power for rides over an hour, coming in at 260W, for an IF (intensity factor) of .89, equal to my previous highest intensity. I also achieved my personal best time on the training loop I did it on, finishing in 1:44 a 31 mile loop with 2000' of climing. It also gave me a rather...odd...power distribution graph.Note the rather large amount of time spent above 280W and the smaller but still noticeable bump above 400W. Definitely not my usual distribution shape.

As I mentioned above, I divided the two types of climbs basically to those shorter or longer than 30 seconds. This is pretty arbitrary but it worked out fine I think. Once I had downloaded my PowerTap into CyclingPeaks, I did a FastFind for the two types of intervals and came up with some surprising numbers that answer the question the title of this post asks, how many climbs in 31 miles? The answer is 46, 26 short climbs and 20 long climbs. To put this in a bit of perspective, with 46 climbs, some pretty minor as I used pretty much any upturn in the road for the short ones, I was doing some sort of climbing every 2 minutes and 8 seconds on average. Pretty typical of Vermont terrain I think, at least of the parts I generally ride.

The short climbs averaged 14 seconds in duration at a power output of 540W, definitely higher than what I was supposed to be shooting for. The graph below shows the average power and duration of each of the short climbs. There is also a trend line showing that I was definitely losing energy as the ride went on. The two yellow lines mark the bounds of the actual range I was supposed to be working in, which I obviously didn't fit in to :)













The longer climbs averaged 1 minute in duration (the longest being 2 minutes) at a power of 342W, again higher than I was supposed to be shooting for. Again, the graph below shows the duration and average power for each of the longer climbs, with a trend line and zone boundaries as above. Note that the trendline in this case moves upward. I think most of the movement is due to the 500W or so effort that was greater than 30 seconds and so got included with the longer climbs. I think the trend would still be upward, note the increasing distance of the green line to the top yellow one, but not as strongly so without the odd entry.

Not sure what tomorrow will bring since the weather is supposed to be not so good. Leastways that is how I intepret 100% chance of rain. I'll likely swap my Saturday and Sunday workouts since I think Sunday will give a bit more of a chance to get my three hour ride in.