Originally Posted by
Allegheny Jet
My lesson learned is to ride every hill as "unique" based on where I'm at in the race and my energy reserves. Using the smallest gearing is a bailout to get up the hill, but has it's cost afterwards due to the high HR. Using the larger gearing on the hill, at a lower cadence, makes me feel as if I'm not as fast but allows me to use other muscle groups to ride the hill by "pushing over the top of the pedals" and standing thus saving some energy to match the groups efforts after the climb. If I was riding a bigger hill and the group was splintered I would probably revert to the low gear with higher cadence for portions and mix in some higher gearing and standing to balance the effort.
Thanks for this post. I took it to heart on our group ride Friday and I did better on a pretty long climb than I ever have. I have almost always just found a gear I could hold and stuck with it till I reached the top. I didn’t like to stand on long hills because it spiked my HR and I worried about burning out.
On the Friday ride it was a bit overcast and the A group didn’t show up. I have been covering as the B group leader and was suggesting a 40 mile ride with only about three or four short climbs but mostly flat between. One of my friends who has always been a better climber than me and he gave a bit of a smirk and asked why we didn’t ride a route with a climb over a range of small hill that has always been a dread for me. It is long and has several steps up that make you feel you have reached the top when you have a long way to go. The smirk was because he knew I would try to save all my energy for the hill and I would simply grind away in whatever gear I had selected at the bottom.
But this time I decided to use more gears and would shift up or down to keep up a better pace and I would up shift and stand just before the top of each rise to give me a little extra speed till I had to down shift again because of the new grade.
I still hate hills but at least this time I had a smile on my face as the friend that suggested the ride finished behind me.
And they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
