Originally Posted by ericm979

How much climbing you do depends on your training goals. I like long races with a lot of climbing, and I like climbing in general, so I do a lot of it in training. Not to mention that I live on the side of a mountain among other mountains. If I go for a ride from home there is going to be a lot of climbing involved. If I want to do a recovery ride, I have to drive down to the valley. Last year I did over 750,000 feet of climbing and I averaged over 100ft of climbing per mile for the whole year.

However, there are times that I can feel my flat ground ability, which isn't all that great anyhow, suffering. I have to work on it if I want to be able to handle rides/races with significant flat ground. If I raced criteriums I'd have to put in some time on the flat doing interval and sprint training.

I wasn't riding when I moved here. It took me a number of years of training before I could ride all the way up the main road (2 miles @ 10%) and the road to my house (1/3 mile averaging 16%, max 23%) without stopping to let my heart rate go back down before attacking the next pitch. There is no casual cycling among my neighbors- even the one guy who rides an old MTB down to the mailboxes to get the paper has a dinner-plate sized cog on the back, and he's working real hard to come back up the road.