Originally Posted by
livedarklions
I'm not sure I get why people are dividing your round trip miles by 2, unless you're climbing a hill one way and descending the other, you're probably doing some of the climbing each way. Obviously, the average grade of a round trip is zero because you end up at the same altitude, but that's a truly useless statistic. Because of the geography where I ride, I do a lot of round trip rides that involve climbing and descending a big hill in both directions of a round trip. Since I'm really only interested in the climbing effort, my solution for this is to treat the descents as 0% grade rather than negative. Descent doesn't negate my climbing efforts.
Here's a handy calculator:
https://www.omnicalculator.com/const...levation-grade
You can change the horizontal difference to miles, km, whatever.
BTW, my belief is that the longer the distance, the less useful the average grade is as a statistic. What you're doing is obviously a lot of climbing, but I find how the climb is distributed on a route to be a bigger determinate of how tired I'm going to get than the total amount of climbing. For example, if I have a 15 mile ride with an average 2.5% grade, it's going to be a lot harder if 14 miles of that ride are essentially flat than if it's a consistent 2.5% per mile.
You're doing great! Is that on roads or dirt?
Unless one has a team car at the top of l'Alpe d'Huez, one returns to the same spot on most ride. Net gain is always zero for mere mortals.
She is giving us a very hard set of numbers. 4100 feet in 13 miles is difficult. This is a simple way to look at caloric expenditures, only an attorney would need a calculator. Unless this route is a climb up and then descent, I would like to see those roads. Nonetheless, it does not matter WRT energy used. Why would you make a distinction that has no meaning.
26 miles with 4100 feet of ascent, irrespective of how distributed, will add a distance equivalent to 20-30 miles making this ride feel more like a 50-55 miler in more typical terrain. There are a few places I can think of where a Century could potentially have 16,000 of ascent, but not many.