Originally Posted by
caloso
I've done it a couple of times. It's hard. For me the thing about it is that it is so unrelenting. Most mountains have some up and down. Haleakala: nope. Maybe a slightly flatter part at the store and at the park entrance, but really it's just a long slog that never ever lets up. Here in NorCal, Mt. Diablo is known as a benchmark climb, but Haleakala is basically 3 Diablos stacked on top of each other.
As for training, I think if I had to choose between climbing hills and churning out long steady efforts, I would choose the latter.
That. You start in Paia and you get maybe a quarter mile of flat, then it starts to rise, and rise, and rise, with no break. Actually one break, after Makawao when you turn off Olinda onto Hanamu road, that is downhill for a little bit. It was even downhill on my simulated ride the other day. After that though it is uphill the rest of the way up. And when I was going down I hit that same point on Hanamu and almost couldn't get myself up because I was so sore. In the video of the simulation you see some of the downhillers actually walking this, but these are people that didn't do the climb, they are bused to the top to basically coast down the entire way. And that just shows how unrelenting it is. It is a tourist thing to do that.