Question about Grade
 

Hello

I just got back to cycling trying to loose weight. I weigh 155 lbs. I wondered what these grades were. I ride a mountain bike with nobbies.

I ride 8.6 miles (round trip) without resting climbing 1138 feet. It takes 1 hour. I go 2-3x a week.

My goal is to ride 26 miles gaining 4100 feet with 3 rest stops of 6 minutes each. I would go the same 2-3x a week.

I can only ride this about 7.5 months out of the year due to heavy snow. The hottest it gets during this ride is about 83 degrees

Can anyone tell me what grade these rides would be? thanks for your time.

Looking forward to loosing weight too.

If you do not increase food intake, it might only take 8-10 weeks to lose 10 pounds doing 26 miles with 4100 feet of climbing 3x per week. But that is three hard rides to be honest. Maybe do it twice per week and do two flat rides for a total of 4 rides per week. Watching the caloric intake is more important than the exercise part but they work together very well. Good luck!!!

If you climb 4100 feet in 13 miles, this 6-7% average gradient.

Disclaimer: I am not a math major.
But according to the USGS: :Percent of slope is determined by dividing the amount of elevation change by the amount of horizontal distance covered (sometimes referred to as "the rise divided by the run"), and then multiplying the result by 100. The "run" assumes you're traveling on an idealized flat surface – it does not account for the actual distance traveled once elevation change is factored in."

So, for your 1st example: Divide your round trip distance in half giving you the one-way distance. Convert miles to feet to keep the units the same.
1138 ft / (4.3 miles X 5280ft) = 0.05; 0.05 X 100 = 5% grade. And Bob's yer uncle!

Yes that might be a bit much, just time-wise to do that more than 2x a week. You are correct, thank you

We could easily add about 200 feet to our current ride making it 1400 feet gain- back within 1.5 hrs-. The extra 200 feet takes a long time.

It will take 2-3 weeks to get in shape enough for my goal to add that much elevation- We'd likely only have Sat & Sun to do longer rides

but occasionally we have no work during the week so can go then too.

I will loose 4-5 lbs the first month no matter what, always going down to 149-150. Then loose a few pounds the next month, and a few more the next month.

Then it levels out to around 137 lbs, I need to watch the food intake to reduce it to 133 lbs. That is a good weight. My husband won't ride more than every other day

Great. Thank you Uncle Bob lol. 5% grade is a good start. Then a 6% will be achievable. Beyond that, we'll see.

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?

It's on the paved road so it's not as good. The "flat part" allows about a 5 minute break, perfect, but is still uphill. Not totally flat.
It's really only 6.5 miles up the hill, then we coast on the entire way home.
There is a short cut, a dirt road we used to ride up adjacent the fire house. It's a much steeper grade but we'd get home quicker if we were short on time
Even that quickie ride cut my depression by 50%

"BTW, my belief is that the longer the distance, the less useful the average grade is as a statistic"

I totally agree with this ^^

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.

It's kind of misleading to rate a ride by average grade. You might be riding up a gradual slope forever and then dropping off a cliff for 200 feet. Or vice-versa would be really tough! It doesn't take many 20% grades to wipe me out, no matter how short they are. Grade is meant to measure the steepness of a particular hill, or specifically a piece of road that may not be the full hill. If you want to know how much climbing you do on a ride, just take the total vertical feet, possibly with a max grade thrown in. BTW you can measure grade by laying your smart phone on the pavement. There's an app for that!

Assuming this is a roundtrip? Gaining 4100 feet over 13 miles is a monster of a climb(s).
This would be a Category 1 climb if not a HC (Beyond Category).
https://www.tourofcalifornia.org/200...ke-climbs.html

please don't give out your address on the internet. Even if just a road and city.

Yes, we agree that most rides net zero elevation. Do you think you're correcting me on that point? OP explicitly said these were round trips which by definition have to gain zero. I said that.

The question concerned average grade. I don't think average grade is a very meaningful number, and none of what you say there refutes that. I never implied that 4100 feet of ascent was a small amount of climbing, but by your logic, it's the same amount of work whether it's spread out over 26 miles or 10 miles or a century so what does the average grade mean? I stated clearly "you're doing great", did I really need to spell out that that means I understand that OP is doing a lot of climbing? If anything, I'm saying the average grade statistic is understating how hard she is riding.

I think it's hilarious that you don't think it matters whether the climbing is at a steady 2.5% or is confined to a couple of climbs at 13% grade simply because it's the same energy being expended (not sure that's actually true, btw, I'll leave that to a physicist) as it certainly affects the odds you're going to "die" on a hill during the ride.

She asked how to calculate it, I showed there was a calculator, why the "only an attorney" cheap shot? Other people showed her the math, do you think only attorneys automate the math?

BTW, if you're bolding my implied question, maybe you should have answered it instead of attacking me for saying a bunch of stuff I didn't say. Why did people divide the round trip mileage in 2? That seems wrong to me, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

You might want to not quote the address you're recommending the OP not publish... :D

edit - I see you've made the edit. :thumb:

Don't get me wrong, I still think that much climbing is great whether road or dirt. I'm a roadie myself. I was just wondering if you weren't making it harder on yourself by riding nobs on road hills. Given that climbing is one of the conditions under which weight of the bike really matters, you're also doing a lot more work using the presumably heavier mountain bike rather than a road bike of some sort.

Seeing that, then your average grade would be distance climbed over 6.5 miles. The other posters who calculated it that way were right. That's a big steep hill, you're going to get into great shape riding up it. Basically, you've got a very hard 6.5 miles, followed by a free ride home provided by gravity.

I'd be ok giving out a medium to big city name, but never the street,
I'd delete the name of that town.

I hope you and OP can delete the info ASAP.

I can agree with this. Saves us from fixing a bunch of posts, instead of just one.

a very good point to both of you. action taken on my part.

I think it was good you caught the address thing in the first place, and am also glad that the mods got on it quickly.

well, what is weird is that i modified my post to remove said information. and my post had indicated that it was edited by someone else (a moderator maybe) but i did not see anything changed. also, i still see the information in the original post. maybe i get to see stuff differently since i am logged in as me? makes no sense.

I'm betting you and the mod were editing it at the same time.

Location and Security
 

So what is the danger here? I have my small-sh city's name in my info each and every post. Please do elaborate.
EDIT I see there is only the State given now.

I plugged a generic route into RideWithGPS, from Sierra City to Sardine Lake. It came out to 1581 vertical feet in 6.1 miles, one-way. Lots of 4-6% grades, with one piece of 8%. A little over a mile of it was unpaved. Obviously Monique's ride is a bit different, but probably something close. Looks like a good effort.

Hope you don't mind the butting-in, but I think the issue is that you really don't know who is reading this, and sometimes you may have stalker-like people of the online and/or in real life varieties. If you're in a small town, random details may be used as clues to ascertain your identity and likely whereabouts. This particular post was a not very long street in a small town.

99.something percent of the time, there's not going to be any problem, but what's the upside of putting yourself at the small risk? People have been SWATted and worse over some imagined slight or whatever online.

Just a reminder not to pay too much attention to the scale; you're replacing fat with muscle, which is much denser. You may not lose much weight, but pay attention to your clothes; when they start getting baggy, you know you're doing it right. I do love baggy underwear syndrome! :D

And yay you! :thumb: Go Monique go! :speedy:

That amount of exercise will not result in weight loss but you will improve your cardio and have stronger butt, torso, and legs muscles. Only cutting calories, especially carbs, will result in significant weight loss. The keto diet is going to provide the best results and it is a healthy long term diet.

It also takes a certain amount of time for the body to consume all the glucose and start to burn fat. A 4 hour ride will do far more in this area than 4 one-hour rides of the same total distance.