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.

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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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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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Ann and I rode 48 miles on the tandem but I wanted to get in a bit more climbing.  She had a short meeting in Morgan Hill so drove up with her and got in 30 minutes of hills repeats up Thomas Grade.  Thomas Grade is one mile with about a 400 feet climb.  I have found it to be ideal for doing hill repeats with an average grade of 8%.

I only had time for 2.5 climbs.  My times on the first two climbs were 6:25 and 6:36.  I checked my log from the last time when I did 3 repeats. This table shows how I did then compared with this time. I also show my max heart rate average heart rate for each lap.  Looking at how I did yesterday and how I did in early March, I can see I am climbing just as well now as then.

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Categories: Cycling, Speed Workout
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After yesterday’s long 101 miles, I didn’t want to put in another long ride. Since I can’t ride tomorrow, I thought this was a good time to another speed workout. I did the same 20 mile course and after a warm up I did 7 minutes hard, then 3-4 minutes easy. I made a slight adjustment to the easy segments so the 7 minutes would be all without any need to turn a corner or come to a stop.

I clearly have improved. This is a mostly circular course so the effect of the wind should balance out when looking at all the legs.

Averaging the four legs, today I went 22.4 mph compared with 21.3 mph last month. Both times my average heart rate during the intervals was 153. It may not sound like a lot but 1.1 mph improvement at that speed is a lot considering the increase in average speed was only a 5% improvement. But with cycling the effort, as measured in watts, is not linear. Using a formula to calculate, last month I was averaging 170 watts to get that speed while today I had to put out 193 watts, a 14% increase, while keeping the heart rate the same. In any sport a 14% improvement when you are basically pushing towards your limits, as a big deal.

Here are the splits for today, April 4th, 2008 and from my prior interval workout on March 13th.

Categories: Cycling, Speed Workout
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After doing a 4.5 mile run this morning I decided to do an interval workout on the bike. After I cycled enough to warm up I cycled as hard as I could for 7 minutes, then rode easy for about 4 minutes. I repeated 4 times. This graph shows my heart rate during the four intervals. For each of the four intervals I was able to take my heart into the anaerobic zone but could not push it higher than 161. When I climb a hill like Metcalf I can take my heart rate up to above 170 for more than the 7 minutes I was using for each interval. I am not quite sure why I can’t seem to get my heart rate up as high cycling on a flat course.  Click each image to enlarge.

And here my splits for the 7 minute intervals. I remove the recovery splits for clarity. The terrain was mostly flat but there was enough variation with the grade and the wind to effect the speed. Except for the first interval I was able to keep the speed above 20 mph and my average heart rate above 150.

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It is Thanksgiving Day. Although it is sunny, it is cold up in Washington State where we are spending the holiday. I felt I needed to get out on the bike so I headed out to do some intervals. After a 15 minute warm-up, I did repeats of 7 minutes hard, 3 minutes easy. I was able to get in 5 such repeats and then bike easy back home for a 26 mile ride.

Biking up here is not that good and I have to go on roads that have quite a bit of traffic and no bike lane. However being a holiday made it much better because of the reduced traffic.

In 10 days I have another race, a four man time trial. I just felt I could not take the whole week off from training. I have been running but that is not the same. For the first few days we were up here it was cloudy and cold. Yesterday we finally saw some sun so I did get in a short ride. It is sunny again today but cold. I went over this morning to buy a newspaper and there was ice on the windshield. I waited until after noon before I went out biking. It was a good way to workup and appetite for turkey.

Categories: Cycling, Speed Workout
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