When in California my favorite place to do hill repeats is up Thomas Grade. There each climb is a 400 ft. elevation gain and takes about 7 minutes.  This is similar to doing mile repeats when I am running.  Being in Utah I didn’t have the same type of hill but I do have a longer climb of a similar grade up Squaw Peak.

So yesterday I set out to do repeats up this hill.  I watched the elevation on my Polar heart rate monitor to know where to start and stop each interval.  I pushed hard to climb 400 feet vertically, then biked easy for a 200 foot climb, then repeat.  I was able to do three repeats when I reached the summit.

This graph shows my heart rate increasing for each of the three repeats.

My times were not quite as fast as when I did a similar 400 foot climb up Thomas Grade, but then I had ridden 120 miles the prior day and was not yet recovered.

Click here to see all my cycling repeats and intervals training.

Categories: Speed Workout
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August is almost over and my training for the big events coming up is in the final stages.  First up will be the Everest Challenge on September 20/21.  This is a two day California/Nevada USCF State Climbing Championship.  Each day has about 15,000 feet of climbing.  Doing that on back to back days will be the big challenge.  I had hoped to do this event last year but the weather turned very bad and I was worried about the doing the Furnace Creek 508 two weeks later so I ended up canceling.

This year I will again be doing the same Furnace Creek 508, but I am more comfortable with that event and feel that the two weeks in between it and the Everest Challenge is sufficient time to recover.

I have built an 18 week training plan to do both events, using the Everest Challenge on week 17 to get ready for the FC 508.  Now that I have finished week 14, with three weeks to go to the Everest Challenge, here is an update of my training status.  You can see that I am on plan for both miles and feet of climbing.  I have another big ride scheduled for this coming Saturday, then it will be taper time.  My climbing is not quite as much as last year when I did the Death Ride and Climb to Kaiser events, but it is still on my plan.  I still need to lose some more weight, however.

Categories: Everest Challenge, Training Log
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Today I did a repeat of last week’s four hill climb. With a total of 84 miles and 8,600 feet of climbing. I started from our Utah house and biked up Provo Canyon, then made the first big climb up the Alpine Loop. After descending down the American Fork canyon I made my way over to the next climb, up Suncrest. After reaching the summit I headed down the backside, called Transverse Ridge, that takes me down to Draper in the Salt Lake valley. This is the turn around point and I retrace my steps back, up Transverse Ridge, down Suncrest, up American Fork Canyon and down the Alpine Loop, back home. Here is the route map. You can see from this profile that is mostly going up or down (click graph to enlarge). My Polar heart rate monitor shows 8,500 feet of climbing. Bikely.com shows over 10,000 feet.

I was able to improve all my climb times, except for Suncrest. Last week I had met up with another cyclists and was pushing hard up Suncrest, hence the difference.

After returning home, Ann and I went on a tandem ride up South Fork.  That brought my total riding for the day to 110 miles.

Here are the comparisons between the two weeks.

Categories: Training Log
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No wonder I am exhausted!  Last September I wrote a blog entry about climbing almost 100 miles.  This year I am climbing even more and have now reached 530,000 vertical feet of climbing, which is over 100 miles up.  That is like climbing all the steps of the Empire State Building 433 times, about twice a day for every day so far this year.  Click the graphs to view enlarge.

At the same time I have biked over 8,000 miles so far this year.  More than half of those were on the tandem.

Categories: Training Log
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We got up early to make a climb up Squaw Peak before the warm temperatures arrived. It was rather cool with a head wind as we made our way up Provo Canyon. We exited from the bike trail over to the busy highway about a half of a mile before the entrance to the Squaw Peak road. Franz had made the climb earlier in the week with a time of 31:51 so we wanted to see how long it would take on the tandem. Our tandem time last year, when we first made the climb, was 47:03. We were sure we could beat that.

We pushed hard all the way up but did hold back some since we have a fast paced ride with the Utah Velo club this evening. We finished in under 40 minutes, for a new best time for us. The climb up Sqaw Peak is 4.3 miles with a 7.4% grade. It is similar to the backside of Mt. Hamilton where the grade is close to 7.9% and the miles of the climb are a bit further.

We felt so good about our climb that when we got home we signed up for another century ride in a couple of weeks.

The weight and heart rate numbers in the table below are for Franz only.

Categories: Training Log
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Not doing that much climbing last week, I decided today to make the climb up Squaw Peak twice.  This climb is similar to the backside of Mt Hamilton in terms of distance and average grade.  The first time I pushed hard to see if I could set a new best time on the climb.  I was able to shave more than 30 seconds off, even though I we did a 111 mile century ride yesterday on the tandem.  The nice thing about finding a new hill to climb is you can set a new PR.  I have started to add a parameter to my tables to show the feet of climbing per minute.  For thie climb today it came out to be 50 ft/min.  My best times up Metcalf this year comes out to be 64 feet per minute but that is a much shorter climb.  My hill repeats up Thomas Grade also come in more than 60 feet per minute.  Considering a 32 minute climb I was very happy I could climb 50 feet per minute.

I took a look at my climbs up the backside of Mt. Hamilton.  These were part of a long ride and I was not pushing the pace but show them here as a comparision.

Categories: Speed Workout, Training Log
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I have updated my log with the training I am doing for the Everest Challenge and Furnace Creek 508.  The Everest Challenge occurs two weeks before the 508.  My miles are on track but my climbing is not quite there yet.  I am getting my weight down.

See here for all the latest charts.

Categories: Everest Challenge, Furnace Creek 508, Training Log
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I use to think I had titanium knees because they never bother me, even when I was training for the next marathon. I am not sure why, but I am starting to feel my knees more. It might be because I am running less or maybe it is just getting older. I looked at my training log and can see that I am biking more than any year in my life, but my running is somewhat less than any of the past few years.

I have experiemented with ways to combine running and cycling into one chart so I can see how much training I am doing. One method uses calories burned (as reported by my Polar heart rate monitor or estimated using formulas). This chart looks like this.  This shows my level of exercise is similar to last year and ahead of the prior few years.  Click each chart to view enlarged.

The other method I have used is to try to translate everything to equivalent running miles by using a formula I have developed. The formula is just an rough approximation.

Here are the charts for running and cycling only.  They show that I am doing a lot more biking and less running than past years.  Maybe that is why I have tired knees?

Categories: Training Log
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Earlier in the day we biked on the tandem up Hobble Creek.  I was looking for more miles so I took my single bike out from the Utah condo to climb Squaw Peak.  I was curious how fast I would be able to climb compared with last year.

After making the climb I continued up the highway to Nunn’s park to get on the bike trail.  It was closed so I turned around there and headed back down the bike path.  About half way down I had to come to a stop because there was a moose right in the middle of the path.  I wish I had my camera with me.

When I got home I tried to compare my climb time up Squaw Peak with prior times but I had not done a good job of recording the previous times.  After doing some looking into my Polar HRM data, I came up with this comparision.  It turns out I did pretty good but the prior times I was not pushing as hard. I averaged only 200 watts output compared with about 275 watts on the Metcalf climb. The difference is this climb is more than twice the distance and 60% more elevation gain.

Categories: Cycling, Training Log
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Ann decided to just run today so we went for a 5 mile run this morning.  I still wanted to do the Metcalf Mauler so I drove up to the trail head in Morgan Hill to bike up from there.  I left early enough to make a climb up Metcalf before riding to the ride start.  I have been trying to get my time down since I was able to often get under 14 minutes last year.  Two weeks ago we set a new best time on the tandem.  Today I made the climb in 14:10, my best time so far this year.  I am getting close to breaking 14 minutes again.  My weight is up 5 lbs from last year at this same time so that accounts for some difference.

Using my current weight of 141, the distance of 1.75 miles and climb of 1,000 feet, I can calculate the power output for today’s climb as follows:

Power required to overcome gravitational resistance: 257 watts.
Power required to overcome rolling resistance: 12 watts.
Power required to overcome aerodynamic resistance: 6 watts.
Total power required: 275 watts.

So what happens if I drop my weight to 136, keep the other parameters set except the time.  What time would result in the same 275 watts?  If I use a time of 13:45, I get the same results.  So you might think the extra 5 lbs cost me 25 seconds.  That is not entirely true because the lighter you are, the less your muscles develop while you climb, but we can still see that there is a significant effect.

I do the Metcalf climb about every other week and usually measure my time.  This table shows several times over the past couple of years.  I think my best time is 13:19, April last year.

Categories: Cycling, Speed Workout
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