do you ever bother checking the grade of your climb?

[Starfish]

I am also obsessed with grade. But, I keep a spreadsheet, and tend to obsess over everything! Strangely, it relaxes me to obsess. I like to use the gradient function on the cyclometer for a variety of reasons.

When I glance down and see that I am managing to sit and pedal up a 15% grade (however short!!), I feel good about myself.

When I am struggling and struggling up what looks like a gentle hill, I understand it more when I see that it is actually a sort of false gentle, and more like 10%.

When I am feeling sorry for myself on a hill, and feeling tired, when I look down and it is only 5%, I realize I can just buck up and keep going, because I know I can do that grade for a long time.

When I am doing unknown rides, and a hill is intimidating me, when I see that it is the same percentage as a hill at home, I feel like I know how to pace myself or deal with it.

Believe it or not, when the view is pretty, I do look at it rather than the computer.

[OakLeaf]

Not during the climb. If it's steep enough to worry about, it's too steep to look at the dang computer

I do love the downloaded data. But I'm not sure how accurate it is. I keep looking at that bubble level thing you linked to, Zen, but how do you download from that?

[Thorn]

I'm with Starfish...obsessing on the grade is relaxing. When I first got my Garmin, I really played with the grade. Not so much for my climbing, but I was starting to put together what people were talking about in bike races. I had grades that matched (although, around here, they're rather shorter in distance).

Now, at home I play grade for the fun of it. I keep track of max grade and feet climbed per mile of a route. I can tell you where my local steepest hill is at 21% and that my training hill is around 8%.

On vacation, it is more fun. Although you cannot use the instantaneous grade read out when you're riding (e.g., that spike to 30% was just an anomoly), like Starfish said, it helps. The GPS will tell me if I'm climbing a false flat, but, more important is the mapping to a "oh, this is an easy hill"-hill.

I had the GPS on my Italy trip and it was relatively new. It was the first time I'd rode somewhere with sustained climbs. The leader laughed at me (ok, with me) as the hill perception changed throughout the trip. First it was, "Hey, I can recover on a 4% grade!" and by the end of the trip it was "Oh, blessed 9%. I'm so glad to see you and say goodbye to 12%".

Oh, yeah, I obsess. No question.