70 miles round trip up the NH coast, 1200' elevation gain. Could be less if I drove to a coastal starting point, too.

Red River Valley, Western MN, Northeast of Fargo, 384 feet / 75 miles = 5.12 ft/mi

I can't go 20 miles in any direction without 2,000 feet of elevation gain, and our terrain is just ordinary rollers, no real mountains.

Can't even do a textbook FTP test here. The only way to ride 20 minutes on flat terrain is to find a big parking lot and go in circles. Pretty much what the local crits do.

For that matter, riding a crit might be the best way to do an FTP test here anyway. I'd need to ride pretty close to maxed out just to keep up with those women. Forget the guys, I'd be dropped the first lap.

The only somewhat flattish terrain I can think of is mostly sluggish pavement -- chipseal, striated concrete, etc. -- the stuff that feels like riding in hard sand. Even then there's no continuous riding for more than a couple of minutes between intersections.

On the plus side, solo riding mostly rural roller coaster routes has made my occasional dabbling in semi-fast group rides a little easier.

The SeaGull Century in Salisbury MD is a long-running annual event that I do every now and then. This past year my Wahoo Elemnt said 104 miles and 450 feet of climbing. The only hills are the bridge to the Chincoteague beach rest stop near the 50 mile mark(which you do twice) and one highway overpass towards the end. The rest is pretty much tabletop flat - if you aren't pedaling you aren't moving...

Since I live near the top of the Surrey Hills I don't have any flat routes. This year so far I've done 2,100 miles and 90,000 feet of climbing. Probably not a lot by some standards but since my previous commute used to follow the path of the River Thames it came as a bit of a shock to the system. After five years I'm almost used to it now.

Probably the one I like to take from St Clair Shores after working at the MB dealership there, riding out the Belle Isle and back. Roughly 40 miles and about 200ft total climbing,

I'm planning a flat century for myself for later this summer or in the fall, 104 miles on the Montour and West Virginia Panhandle rail trails. Ride with GPS says it should be about 4400' of climbing. I don't know if it's absolutely the flattest 100 mi in my area, but it's got to be close.

I can get on my local rail trail, the Western Reserve Greenway in NE Ohio, and ride a 40 mile out-n-back that Mapmyride tells me has 543 feet of climbing. Flattest trail around here, that's for sure.

Steve Z

You know it's flat when you ride among playas.

There's a 40-mile loop just west of Perryton that flirts with 5.3'/mile.



Shrug. You eventually get to the top of a climb. You can ride all day and never get to the top of a headwind.

That is very true. I typically do an out and back ride and rarely have a tailwind. Nothing like a 30 mph crosswind to teach you bike control.

We might have a winner ... at the very least, I'm impressed.


Also, I had to look up Perryton and got a laugh at the image on Google - "LESS AMERICA" ... what kinda godless commie town is this?!?!

Do you have the technology to look up the Katy Trail say from St Charles to Rochport?

I used Strava to map out a 100-mile route from Howell Island heading West on the Katy Trail - 506 ft of climbing. And that's going 'up'. Dang!!

Northwest Georgia has little anyone would call flat apart from the Silver Comet Trail.

It is a converted rail trail and people who lay railroad tracks tend to avoid steep grades.

Even so, it is something like 2300 ft over ~68 miles from the edge of Atlanta to the Alabama border.

There are several trestles, one long tunnel through a mountain and many rock cuts which make it much flatter than the surrounding terrain.


-Tim-

This was my route yesterday on my FG. So flat Google maps doesn't even show elevation.
It's my favorite place to ride on a Sunday because you can choose to go flat flat or throw in great hill climbs on either end up and down those green mountains.




Vedder Canal



Tobacco drying sheds



This was the hilly part

Happy with your performance you say? You coasted for over 17 minutes.... COASTED.




statistics are funny things. For a hundred miles solo, I think you have reason to be pleased.
Cheers, Eric

So true:That 5 foot elevation was just a short bridge over a creek.

It is flat there - very flat for up country, but I wouldn't be at all surprised by a flatter route somewhere along the Gulf Coast.

My flattest, an easy ride with a malfunctioning HRM. I do have a bunch of rides at under 10' per mile, including a century at 9' a mile. Not too hard around here...

I don't need a flat route, i have a regen assist system. But if i did, i have an extremely flat 50 mile route.

I live about the same level as The Grand Union Canal. It passes through my town. I should be able to find a flat route to it. There are very few locks on it for the first 25 miles north (three i think) where the level drops just a few feet.
So that's a 50 mile round trip within a 20ft layer, with very occasional variation.

Wouldn't wanna do it with 23mm tyresm though. For that, it'd have to be the UK's first road, the 1,930 year old Watling Street, which also passes through my town. Here it runs along side the high-speed London to Birmingham main railway line. That's pretty flat.

If i wanted really flat i'd go to East Anglia, where an entire corner of England is like the salt flats, but green.

Here is a ride that one cyclist (not me) did along the Katy.

https://www.strava.com/activities/156952670/overview
https://www.strava.com/activities/156952670/analysis

Looking at it, it is pretty flat from about Marthasville to Columbia (Rocheport/New Franklin/Boonville Bridge).

https://www.strava.com/routes/19875341

RT, one gets 228.32 miles.
1116 ft.

4.89 feet per mile.

Of course one gets a little extra rolling resistance from the limestone gravel surface.

Rowan and I cycled this route on Sunday ... we chose it because it is one of the flatter ones around. If we extend it to 60 km (40 miles), it would be hillier.




The Cycleway is pretty flat and again, if we went further, it would be hillier.





The Pipeline Track is another reasonably flat option.




We could go out to Seven Mile Beach and be able to ride a fairly flat route but there might be some loops etc.

We go to a nearby town and do laps and loops for another reasonably flat ride.

And I think that's the extent of our choices of flat routes. Nothing over about 30 km. If we wanted to do more, we'd have to do the routes more than once.

I have to ride pretty far to see any kind of real elevation gain in Central Illinois. Most of it is flat as a pancake until you get to a river.


And this is the scenery you get to look at for all 90 miles of it [round trip].

I think of something as "flat" if it's the kind of course I'd seek out to do a fast, steady tempo speed. The flattest out-and-back course for more than 10 miles (it's 12.2 miles) that I can make starting in Ithaca, NY is +/- 27.1 feet per mile (it has a few rollers with above 6% maximum grades) and the flattest loop that I've created that's longer than 10 miles (it's 16.53 miles) is +/- 25.2 feet per mile, but it's got a couple of short back-to-back rollers with 10.2% and 8.4% maximum grades and almost all of the elevation change occurs within two stretches of 5 miles and 3 miles (plus the road surface is sub-par to ridiculously awful for about 4 miles). So nothing in town is what I'd call conducive to fast, steady riding for the whole thing. You can make short loops that are flatter (mostly downtown) but they have way too many sharp turns and potential stops to be good for a decent-speed tempo ride.

I have to go about 17 miles from my place to get to it, but riding on this road boosts the speed by a little over a mile per hour vs. the courses that start and finish in Ithaca:

www.strava.com/activities/1835528102

Strava says the elevation gain is 15.8 feet per mile and the road is only mildly bad in a few half-mile-long spots. I went out and back twice on that recorded bit and stopped short of where I started on the second return (needed to get to a C-store for a water refill or I would have had to go 21 more miles to the next store), so it was basically 23.7 miles for the first out-and-back on that ride. You can go a few miles farther SSE toward Owego than I did and still stay just as flat, so that means you can get 30+ miles on one out-and-back. You can't get 40 miles without at least two U-turns or without encountering a grade above 6%, but it's the best you can get around here if you want to stay on flat terrain or very shallow slopes. The regular state TT course is a little farther South of this road and is just about as flat, with an elevation gain of 16.8 feet per mile. It's pretty fast.

Does this count?

https://www.strava.com/activities/718263879

It does list some climbing, I think with some rolling hills near the start of the ride...

70 miles (just over metric century), and 6,616 feet elevation drop.

It lists climbing at about 2,976 feet, but add that in, and one has nearly 10,000 feet of descending.

I'm not quite sure why my speed wasn't higher. I was hitting 40 MPH on some of the descents. Loaded. I also had a radial tire wire in one of my tires causing slow leaks and pinch flats, and being hard to locate.