In another thread that was (mainly) about annual mileage, the conversation veered toward vertical feet or meters accumulated over a year, and how it seemed less than ideal to measure it in feet or meters. Some took exception to that little derailment, so on the off chance anyone else might care to follow (and to avoid further annoying those only interested in flat distances ), I'll restart here.

Coming across discussions of "Everesting" here and there recently got me to thinking that vertical distance might be generally measured in terms relative to that accomplishment. A single Everest in a day is certainly extreme, but evidently not impossible, and such a large unit isn't very convenient or easy to relate to, which got me to thinking that maybe 1% of it would be convenient, and I think it is.

One percent of the elevation of Mt. Everest is about 88 meters, or 290 feet, which, over the course of between a kilometer and a mile, is a bona fide hill, but a very common sort, familiar to all but those who live on a prairie or coastal plain. It's also an amount that one may accumulate over the course of many an ordinary 90 minute ride over unremarkable terrain - all but the flattest, where there is no climbing to be measured in any event. So I thought, maybe that 1% of Everest is more meaningful than I expected. If a unit of measurement, Climbing Unit or CU is given as that 88 meters or 290 feet, over an ordinary, mostly flat, but somewhat rolling terrain, one could expect to accumulate 1 CU within an average 60-90 minute ride. A couple of hours doing hill repeats, one might get 10 CU. A somewhat hilly Gran Fondo? Maybe 30 CU. And of course the extreme - a 100 CU ride - a full Everest. An annual accumulation in the hundreds would indicate regular hilly rides and such, and I think most would agree that 1000 would be something worth bragging about.

Of course such a unit of measurement would be arcane, and it would be absurd to use it in describing the size of something or the distance between two points (which is what feet and meters are meant for), but as a way of describing the amount of climbing done over the course of a ride or some period of time, I think it actually works out rather elegantly. One of the nicest things about it is that people who use feet and people who use meters don't have to make conversions when talking about the character of a ride - CUs are agnostic.