Can't make it to the top of the hill
 

This is the first time I take this route. I am on my endurance road bike with about 20 lbs of goods on the rack. My lowest gear is 34/32. I can't get the top the hill. I make it about 3/4 of the hill. I simply run out of air.

Let's say I am on a touring bike that's 10 lbs heavier. And the lowest gear is 26/34. Will I do any better?

Possibly...

If you're referring to the route pictured, the problem isn't your bike or the gearing. It's the engine.

Subtracting the earlier bump and descent, you're climbing roughly 200' in 2.5 miles. This shouldn't challenge anyone in decent shape. Its the equivalent of climbing 20 flights of stairs in a bit under half an hour.

What I suggest, is that you try to find some routes with hills and do more hill climbing, though less ambitious, to build up to where this one can be taken in stride.

BTW - an easy way to gauge overall fitness is to climb stairs, or a hill of known height against the clock. This isn't a scientific or precise measure, but it will give you a sense of what you can do.


Of course, you can drop gearing yet lower, giving you more time to climb the hill slower, but you'll run into limitations in your ability to control a bike at walking speed, and IMO grinding up a hill his way only prolongs the agony. It's necessary when climbing taller hills, but I don't think it should be for anything this small.

I am not in my best shape :). What I was trying was 200 ft climb in 0.5 miles.

I think I did about 160 ft climb in 0.4 miles and I ran out of air :)

Time and training can work geological wonders. If you're patient and persistent you'll soon be wondering why these seem like such a terrible obstacle.

But don't feel bad. 200' in 2500 is roughly an 8% average grade, which is pretty respectable. If you were running out of leg, then lower gearing might help, but only conditioning can overcome your limitations in sustaining power over a decent time interval.

That got me curious. So I looked around and found that the way to calculate gradient is ft in climb divided by ft in distance. Is that right? The toughest part of the climb is 174 ft (53 meters) over 1805 ft (550 meters) in distance. So the gradient is about 9.64%. Not sure what that means. But I know it's a steep hill -- it's steep even for driving :)

My original intent of the post is to see if using a heavier touring bike with lower gear would make sense. I don't want to be pushing the bike with 20 lbs of stuff on the rack up a steep hill :)

To be precise it's rise over run, or the horizontal "map" distance. The recorded distance up the slope will be greater, especially on steeper hill.

There's no cutoff for what a steep hill is, and IME how steep it feels varies with length. A 10% climb is steep, but if its short enough you can charge and crest it before you feel the effects. OTOH, a sustained climb of more than 5% can be a bear.

In hill climbing weight is the absolute enemy -- consider climbing stairs carrying a load vs empty handed. But lower gearing doesn't add weight. Consider dropping the inner ring down to 24 or 26t if it's a triple, if not get one.

My road bikes are doubles, and that's fine for most of the riding I do here in the Northeast, though I may have to work hard here and there. But for extended touring, I use a triple crank, set up exactly like my road bike, plus a "bailout" granny of 26t. It adds negligible weight, and is rarely used, but it's really appreciated when it's needed.

That's very true. I am trying to recollect what really happened to my hill climbing experience today now. There are ups and downs along to whole climb. And the very steep uphill is about 18% grade. I did 17% and failed because I had no more air in me :) I think I would have to be in very good shape or even the top of my shape to be able to make it with the same bike carrying the same load :)

What I mean is my current bike is about 22 lbs. The lowest gear I can get out of this bike is 34/32. The touring bike I am thinking about 30 lbs. The lowest gear of that bike is 26/34. If I use the touring bike, I wonder if I can make it up there, carrying the same 20 lbs of stuff...

I see what your thinking here.
On my tour this past summer I walked out of quite a few river valleys. My bike loaded was about 120lbs most days. That bike has 28/32 gearing. Fall pricing, I bought a new bike, with the lowest gearing being 26/36. I feel this bike will climb a tree. I don't expect to (and don't now) use the Granny gearing. But nice to have when you can see the last twelve vertical feet to climb, and don't want to push, and re-mount at the crest.

Hope this helps.



=Snuts-

The only weight that really matters here is the weight of the bike plus gear plus you plus your clothes (and anything else you bring). In other words, what a truck scale would record. The touring bike has a gear that is 72% of your endurance bike. This means for the same effort (not speed!) you can haul 39% more. Let's say you (including clothes, shoes and everything in your pockets) weigh 210 pounds. Say you have 3 pounds of stuff on each bike. Now, first your endurance bike:

Weight = 210+22+3 = 235 pounds

Now your touring bike: Wt = 210+30+3+20 = 263. 263/139 = 189 pounds. Yes, your touring bike will be easier by 24%. But your hill will take 39% longer so you got nothing free.

Back to FB's points - riding your touring bike is probably a good place to start. Ride it to the top. Don't sweat the time. Do it until you can make it riding one gear higher. Do that a few times. Then you will be ready for your endurance bike. You'll make it AND it will be both fun and a lot faster. You won't look back.

Ben

I do it on a daily basis on a touring bike that is loaded, total weight most days is around 55 pounds and occasionally as high as 85 pounds. Yes, the gearing makes all the difference in the world. Mine is 24/34 now, but was 26/34 for years. I can do the hills with either. I commute in the Ozarks half the year and in Pittsburgh the other half, so lots of hills. Gearing is your friend. You can sit and spin rather than grinding your way up the hills.

Don't sweat the weight. A meaningful difference in gearing will have a much greater impact.

^This. Eliminate all of the weight that you don't need for your commute. Carrying a lock? Leave/lock it at work. Carrying extra gear "just in case"? Minimize it. Extra body weight? Revise your diet with simple changes.


Are there any stairs that you can walk daily? A stairwell at work? A nearby tall building? Start walking stairs at lunch.


In a month, you'll be blasting up that hill...

What's the conversion rule of thumb you used for this? Please illustrate with the revised estimate of 200' in .5 miles.

I guess the only rule of thumb is to read posts and take them at face value.

In post No.4 the OP says he was trying to climb 200' in half a mile. I converted the half mile in to feet (rounded off for easy math) and came up with the roughly 200/2500 rise/run or 8% grade.

Of course, some might quibble with 2500' for half a mile, but I consider it close enough for our purposes.

I've got a hill at the end of my commute that depending on which side I approach from either averages around 12% and peaks at 20% or averages around 8% and peaks at 14%. The steep side is 1/4 mile long, the gentler side is about 1/2 mile long. Both are exhausting, but in different ways. I mention this as background information.

My experience is that I need a low enough gear to be able to maintain a reasonable cadence, but below a certain point (the 22x32 gear on my mountain bike, for instance) I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere in spite of putting in a lot of effort. You just need to find the gear that's comfortable for you. Which gear that is will likely change over time.

As for more concrete advice.... First, FBinNY is spot on about training. You don't need to use a hill that steep to train for a hill that steep, and doing so would probably be less effective. You need to build the strength somewhere else. Second, and I personally think this is more important, don't be ashamed to get off and walk. If you can't make it, you can't make it. So what? Maybe you can make a goal of getting up the hill, but until then it's not a big deal. I often walk up the hill at the end of my commute, depending on my mood. I can make it up the hill, but a lot of days I just don't feel like working that hard. It's a choice.

Ebike.

This is the commuting forum. "HTFU and in a few months you'll get it" sounds like bad advice if it's preventing OP from getting to work on time.

And it's San Francisco. I thought all the cyclists took the train uphill.

No, I mean converting cycling X foot rise over Y miles to climbing A flights of stairs in B minutes

Twenty flights of stairs can be walked at a leisurely pace in less than 10 minutes by anyone who's in moderately good aerobic condition. I don't know where you're getting the half an hour thing, but if it takes you 30 minutes to climb 20 flights of stairs, best to take the elevator. The CN Tower, which is about 1500 vertical feet, takes most people about 30 minutes to do.

Two hundred feet of climbing in 2.5 miles is equivalent to a 1.5% grade, and can be done, again, by someone in moderately good condition in 10 minutes.

Oh, that's much more simple. For short term purposes, ie hills that take less than 5-10 minutes to climb, distance doesn't matter so much. It becomes almost purely a question of total height gained.

Assuming you have adequate gearing, climbing 200' in half a mile at 8% or a mile at 4% in roughly the same amount of time takes comparable effort. This is something that many who have multiple choices to climb the same ridge or hill discover soon enough.

The "only altitude counts" concept breaks down when hills are longer because the time element becomes a factor in its own right.

I should add one bit of advice for the OP.

There's no harm and plenty of good in stopping for a minute or two when you run out of juice on a climb. You'll be amazed at how much you can recover in a short break. Ideally you want to top the hill on the next surge. Try to get at least halfway, or better yet two thirds of the way up before stopping, because what you can cover between stops will get progressively shorter.

BTW - I refer to a certain class of hill as "bite size". These are hills that you can attack on a single hard effort, drawing on your reserves and topping before they run dry. We all have our own bite size hills, but just as with candy bars, "bite size" varies with the individual. But the concept is a useful tool for climbing.

Go out and find some hills. Attack them as if there were a big dog behind you, go as far you can before crapping out. Make a note of how far you got this way, subtract about 10% and that's bite size for you. Hereafter, it's a question of gauging hills and deciding whether they're bite sized or need to be broken off and chewed over time. Using the bite size concept, and attacking select hills will save time on your rides, and in the process make you a stronger climber.

You're right about how long it should take to climb 20 flights of stairs. I used 30 minutes since that's the OP said it took for his climb.

Looking back, he actually took less time, since most of his 30 minutes were buned before the actual climb.

But it's not about any particular numbers, it's what each of us can do, and that varies tremendously person to person.

Try it for yourself some time. Run or walk up a set of stairs in a tall building (or hillside if they do that out west). Note how far you get before feeling it, and/or the time to that level. Now find a hill of similar height an climb on your bike. Assuming you have the gearing, I'll bet that the time and effort to the same height will be very close.

Years ago, I lived on the side of a decent hill that the road climbed via a grade with a switchback. It also had stairs built up the fall line (a common feature in hilly NYC neighborhoods). Friends and I would hold bike/foot races to the top, and learned that the same people won regardless of how they did it.

Have someone let a snarling dog loose when you're 2/3 of the way up. You'll be at the top before you realize it.

Get lower gearing. 200 feet of elevation in 0.5 miles is quite steep.

With practice, it will get easier. I remember my first hilly commuting route. I just measured it, and it climbs about 180 feet in one mile, so I find it funny that it used to be hard. The first few weeks, I huffed and puffed. Then after some time, I noticed that I reached the top without even thinking about the fact that I was climbing.

ditto that [MENTION=152773]noglider[/MENTION]. For me it was 75 ft in about .2 miles to get out of my apartment complex, and I flat out couldn't do it the first few times. Over time it became just a short hill to get over. A big granny gear would have come in handy at first though.

A lower gear makes it easier to get up the hill, but it doesn't help make you stronger at hill climbing. In fact, the higher gear you use, the stronger you get. I learned this when I started commuting on a fixed gear bike. I couldn't shift down; I used the only gear I had. That's when I started getting good at climbing.