Originally Posted by RChung

Are you saying that if I hold my hand above a table top, there is no "right" distance between my hand and the table top?

Originally Posted by RChung

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.

Originally Posted by RChung

I side-stepped the cumulation problem a while back by asking, "how much change in height and what gradients would it take so that the energy expended to get you up those hills and across those distances in the amount of time you took is consistent with the observable data?" and ended up showing how to turn an expensive power meter into a cheap altimeter.