Originally Posted by
Vicegrip
Most of us ride more than a mile on a ride but few gain 5280 feet of climb. This means you will almost always see a fraction of a unit of measure. Even climbing past one mile you still end up needing to add a fraction of the climb past the first or second mile of climb. Not that it was made for cycling alone but the two units of measure are rather well scaled to the amounts often seen.
Originally Posted by
GuitarBob
It's got nothing to do with what 'sounds' good; instead, it has everything to do with choosing a scale that is appropriate to use. Climbs are measured in feet or meters because that works for a typical climb; rides measured in km or miles for the same reason.
In the same way you could report body mass in tons or in ounces, the scale doesn't make sense.
Did you think my suggestion regarding Climbing Units made any sense?
Originally Posted by
kbarch
Maybe we need a more meaningful unit of measure. How about something that is neither inherently metric nor imperial? How about a percent of the height of Mt. Everest, equal to about 88 meters or 290 feet? This year I got an 807 (i.e., over eight whole Everests)! Even on a modest ride one could gain whole units, but even the climbing-est riders wouldn't accumulate an unwieldy number. They could be called CUs, short for climbing units - like AUs or astronomical units (mean distance between Earth and Sun)!
Giving it some more thought this morning, it occurred to me that this unit equates, over the course of between a kilometer and a mile, to something most people would say qualifies as a
bona fide hill. Maybe nothing particularly difficult, but certainly noticable. In a nice ride over rolling ground with a few hills thrown in, one might easily get ten climbing units - something like ten modest hills, which sort of correspond to experience. For example, this morning we went out for a bit on River Road and did three repeats of Alpine Hill (and another repeat of the boat basin-to-circle bit for good measure) and over the course of the whole ride got in nine climbing units. Alpine x3, Great Wall of China, Unnecessary Hill, the three other little climbs along River Road.... Although most of those are much less than a full CU, Alpine from the boat basin is 1.5 CUs by itself,so yeah, it sort of adds up.