Originally Posted by
Iride01
If I walk up the 8 foot hill in my yard, did I not climb any distance? That section of my yard is between the 350' and 360' foot contour line. The map data doesn't have the elevation data for every square inch of ground. If I mow my grass in then I'm climbing and descending multiple times that 8' of height, but I won't get any credit for climbing going by map data.
As another has said, with barometric sensors, resolution is the issue. Both for the devices ability to sense a certain amount of change reliably and factors that cause noise, unreliable data that have to be taken into account. If I go up and down five feet is that climbing and descending? If I go up and down 1 foot is that climbing and descending?
Getting back to the topo maps, it's possible to ride between the contour lines in places for many miles. That doesn't mean no climbing or descending was taking place unless your resolution has to be 10 feet or more.
The work it takes to raise a mass
m up a height
h under the force of gravity
g is
m*g*h. So that's what I do: rather than measure barometric pressure or GPS elevation gain or worry about resolution, I skip past all of that: I use total work, m, and g, to calculate what h must have been. As a part of that, I get the entire road profile.
So, yeah, I'd say that each time you're mowing your lawn up hill, I count that.