Every year in April my club has an elevation gain challenge. It serves to get us ready for the summer riding season. Participants each post what their climbing goals are for the month, from a minimum of 7,000 feet to one lbs worker who plans to do 100,000 feet. I am shooting for 25,000 feet. What amounts of climbing are the rest of you planning or acheiving out there?

5000 feet.

All of my good climbs are still snowed in.

What are you using to count vertical feet? Are some GPS still woefully inaccurate?

I did only 55,000 last month, but I plan to double that amount in April.

Climbing season has begun!

In 2004, when I did 1.2 million feet, I logged 108,000 in April. Only 98,000 in 2005, and a paltry 52,000 in 2006.

This means nothing. I can climb 100 10-foot high hills and get 1000 feet of climbing but it's nto equal to one 1000-foot climb. Of course, when the numbers are as high as Morse's (i.e. 1.2 million) it's impressive even if they were all 10 feet tall.

I climbed 22,000 1ft climbs in march... some were consecutive

i logged 25,974ft in just 208 miles (half the month was snow for me, so i only rode half the month)...so on average i climb about 50,000 ft a month...i do live in pittsburgh!

Terry, just for putting a clearer picture in my mind, have you tried putting these distances in say, planetary terms? ie: 3 trips to Mars and 1 to the moon?

I did 1300' on Monday without leaving Saint Paul in 90 minutes. Yesterday I thought it had meaning. Today, not so much.

January - 43,234
February - 28,630
March - 38,722
April - 7,385 and counting...

Avg: 37,231

Where I live there really aren't any flat rides, so I average about 90-100 feet of climbing per mile. So generally 40-60k per month.

A mere foot isn't very much, so you get big numbers pretty quickly.

I did manage a vertical double century in 2004, which is 1,056,000 ft.

I know what you mean. Berkeley and the east bay had the nifty 1050 ride last weekend, but was it 10,000 feet in 50 miles or was it 50,ooo feet in 100 miles?

All of the major climbs in my area and not a few of the smaller ones have been done by several different people with GPS, altimeters, and topomaps. Good to the last few feet. Close enough. If I am doing a ride that connects a lot of different bumps and grades I use bikely.com or toporoute.com.

good numbers, about average for our climbing set. Not that we are average cyclists.

i, and i'm willing to bet most of you, have climbed a net zero feet so far this year.

Average about 40,000' per month, and hit a couple of 70,000' months in later summer

The hill I live on is a 450 vertical foot climb. If I ride 26 days per month (usually more) that's 12,000 feet getting to my front door. My hill interval workout that I do once each week adds at least 3000 vertical feet. Then there's the other climbing I do here and there. 5000' last Saturday for example. I'd guess that in March I was probably good for about 50,000 vertical feet or so, and I was NOT on a mission. I wonder how many vertical feet I climbed in Greece where I was doing at least 5000' daily over about 2 weeks. I wonder if I hit 100,000 vertical feet last August? I'll bet it was about 75K or so. The longest climbs around here are about 700-1200 vertical feet, 3-5 miles long. Nothing like you get out west.

There are two occasions where I rode up but SAG'd down, so I'm at about 10k net vertical feet for the year.

Nope.. I keep moving my house uphill too

If it was 10k feet in 50 miles, that's an amazing 200 ft/mile. I've never been able to put together a route with more than about 150 ft/mile.

Assuming you start and finish at the same place, the average grade would have to be about 8%. It's hard to build a route with that much grade over several miles.

I'm planning on doing a hill-climb TT the first weekend in May- 2,900 ft. over 7 miles (the Wintergreen Ascent TT near Charlottesville, VA, if anyone is interested in participating).

I'll be doing a lot of climbing between now and then to train, and a lot afterward, since I live in hilly Virginia. Ain't no flats around here.

Damn. Y'all are tiring me out! I'm gonna go climb back into bed: vertical distance, three feet.

How are you guys measuring vertical feet? Website or GPS?

Polar 720i, which has a barometric altimeter. As altimeter computers go, it's pretty accurate. If anything, it underreports cumulative altitude by up to 5% on big climbs.