Half a Mountain

We decided to ride our mountain bikes from Round Valley Regional Park up to Morgan Territory Regional Park. We vastly underestimated how hard and how long this ride would be.

http://www.tandemhearts.com/temp/round-valley.jpg

This is the profile from today's ride. We only covered about half the distance to Morgan Territory. The trail continues up at about the same grade for at least 3/4 of a mile and continues up beyond that for a few more miles. The average grade is 23%.

This is going to be an awesome training ride for me to get ready for next year's doubles and brevet series.

V.

23%! Wow!! Does that mean you won't have to ride with rocks? ;)

The coach does have a heart. I never have to ride with rocks when we're mountain biking. :D

V.

And it goes both ways, as I've discovered. All the road biking I did this summer made me a strong climber on the mountain bike. Did you feel that on this ride? (But I still don't have technical skills to speak of. I always seem to crash going downhill when it gets the least bit technical...like today :rolleyes: )

Oh yeah! A year ago I never would have even attempted this ride. Now it's a goal to make it all the way up this sucker. It is a fire road, but it's very loose, rocky and steep where we stopped. I walked up beyond where we ended to see how much further the loose stuff went for... it's going to be tough.

But goals are supposed to be tough.

V.

What's your formula for calculating percentages?

500 feet elevation gained divided by 1/2 mile (2640 feet) in the bump. Sorry - should be 19%. The first time I did it as 600 feet gained.


Anyway - it's freakin' steep. :p With some sections well over 20% according to my inclinometer.


V.

Ah, OK. I eyeballed it as a 0.65 miles with 500 ft. Comes out to 14.6%. I thought, "Well, maybe the teacher knows better.:confused: " :D

Ride laps around Briones. That would give you lots of great steep interval training and sustained riding.

This is only 15 minutes away. :D

V.

My most challenging climbs are 350 ft in 1/2 mile so I cannot imagine actually being able to ride that. It would be a walker. I have short little burst areas that are real steep, but not for such a prolonged distance. Yesterday I unweighted my front end to get over a rock and ended up on my feet behind my bike. Interesting feeling...