Ok,
I did my first organized century ride that I've done in quite some time last weekend.
It was organized by the local cycling club. $40 ($50 for last week registration).
They had several partly overlapping rides/routes. 100 miles, 62 miles (metric century), and 40 miles (mostly flat).
Total climbing for the Century was about 5000 feet. Metric Century was a little over 2000 feet.
Both routes started with a good climb, and a second climb in the middle, and a few rolling hills. But, somehow finding taller, harder climbs for the 100 mile ride. A few moderately busy roads, but much of the ride was very rural.
The advantage of partly shared routes was that rest breaks were shared between all three rides. Some of the food we saw more than once as they'd pack it up and take it to the next break location (3 rest stops for the 100 mile ride).
Routes were marked on the street (different colors for each ride), and provided with RWGPS. I dumped the route from RWGPS to a Strava route which allows live routes which was handy. They also had volunteers at a few critical corners to direct riders.
Originally Posted by
joewein
This probably should go into a thread of its own, but here is my two cents' worth anyway...
Strava's current elevation challenge is a joke. It's a bit like ranking numeric elevation totals in meters against elevation totals in feet (depending on the country of the athlete) as if they were one and the same.
They pit cyclists with barometric altimeter devices (Garmin 5xx/8xx/1000/o_synce N2C, etc) directly against iPhone / Android application users, whose numbers are simply not comparable because they're based on noisy GPS data. GPS readings for elevation are very approximate. They will go up and down a lot as satellite reception changes. If taken at face value, all the noise added up would often triple the total compared to a Garmin or other barometric device that has done the same course.
I've been watching the differences between Strava and RWGPS. I will often run both simultaneously on my phone. The real time RWGPS climbing is of by a factor of about 2x, or even 3x. I think Strava actually cleans up the elevation data with post processing and may come close to reality.
Climbing for my ordinary "errand" rides is a bit surprising, and routes that seem flat just aren't. So about half of my every day climbing is from gradual elevation change, and half from hills, most of which are relatively short. My 50 to 100 foot commuting climbs hardly register as a blip next to the 800 to 1000 foot climbs on the Century ride.