unbelievably

...
This is my first year riding my road bike.
I'm having a blast!
What I wanna know is,
What do you all consider a tough hill?

Seems that all I have around me are tough a**ed mountians(Japan).

Am I being tough on myself???
Are any of you familiar with Japanese geography???
I'm getting tired of these 100m switch-backs...

Hammertoe

It's a relative question...

One persons mountain is another's overpass...

Just keep riding them and when you ride somewhere else you will see how tough you had it...

What doesn't kill you will only make you stronger...

derath

When I have to mash out of the seat in the granny gear.

-D

canthidefromme

The tougher it is going up, the more fun it is going down

nobrainer440

It's all relative. I live in Kansas, so 300 or 400 feet is a big hill.

BetweenRides

When you're a Clydesdale, anything over 1% grade is a hill. I can sense changes in grade with the accuracy of a seismograph ;-).

CdCf

Time for a bit of fuzzy logic. An incline that every single rider in the world agrees is a hill (alternatively, a 100% grade) gets the value 1. A perfectly flat road (0% grade) gets the value 0. Any incline in between the two is assigned a value between 0 and 1. Therefore, any stretch of road that has any amount of inclination has some degree of "hilliness" (i.e. a non-zero value).

Of course, I'm just being a bit silly now...

8Lives

I think any ride that has 90-100 feet of vertical per mile would be considered "hilly". There is either a lot of up and down, or a couple of pretty big climbs to get to 100ft/mile. So if your typical 20 miler has 2,000 feet of climbing, that would be hilly IMHO. From what I know of your geography I'd guess your rides are somewhere between hilly and really f**ing hard!

Aaron

johnny99

Mountains are usually designated by a country's geography agency (the USGS in the USA) to have summits at least 2000 feet (or 600 meters) taller than the surrounding plains. Anyone calling an overpass a "mountain" probably greatly overestimates other lengths as well.

CdCf

The area around here has a deeply jointed bedrock, brought to the surface and polished through dozens of glaciations throughout the quaternary. The "cracks" are filled with deep clay deposits, forming flat plains between the hill ridges. The hills are low, but frequent and often fairly steep, although short. In many cases you can afford to go anaerobic since they're so short. Cuts your average speeds quite a bit, though. It's possible to ride on the flat plains quite a bit, and completely avoid hills, but you'd be "locked" in the valley you start in.

unbelievably

Thanks for the light hearted responses...

CrimsonKarter21

When you need to go to the middle of the rear cluster is when I consider a hill challenging. I bin prac'sin ma!!!

cuda2k

I'm a flat lander and I know it. Though it makes me feel good when I am able to pass all the other dallas flat landers on what climbs there are around here.

jschen

A tough hill also depends on where it falls on the ride. Tomorrow's SoCal BikeForums Apple Pie ride has a 1000 foot (vertical) hill with moderately steep grades. Usually, this would be worth mentioning but not really a big deal. But tomorrow, it comes at mile 100, with 9500 feet of climbing already done. It hurts. The first time I rode that route in its entirety, 6 miles into that climb, both legs cramped up as I got out of the saddle and I fell over into the middle of the road.

Phantoj

To me, a tough hill is the one where you come around the corner of what you thought was the last of the climb, and you see the road rising up like a wall in front of you.

To answer the OP, I would think about 400 ft of elevation gain is where a hill becomes worth mentioning. In the Midwest, maybe worth naming at 400 ft.


I have not lived in really mountainous areas, though.

ALPhillips

I use 10,000 feet per 100 miles as a fuzzy rule of thumb.

bbattle

On Friday, I did a 31.5 mile ride that included a 1.2 mile climb with an avg. grade of 11.5%. At about the 1 mile mark, it goes flat for about a hundred feet, but to get there, you have to climb this short "wall" of ~20%. total climbing for the ride was 2135ft. The other climb was 1.9 miles but wasn't nearly as steep and had a couple of descents thrown in for fun.

Saturday, 93.6 miles with lots of rolling terrain and one section around Toms Ford dam in Tenn. that was very hilly. Luckily, the dogs waiting for me on the hillsides provided much needed encouragement.

FIVE ONE SIX

LMAO!

Rutnick

I'm a clyde. Just came back from the mountains. Don't group us all in there. The wall at brasstown is 26% and I made it up.

kenny!

It is relative. Last summer I took my bike to the mountains in PA and decided to ride the top of a mountain that I recalled as being pretty flat (I didn't really feel like tackling mountains). Well, the relatively flat had some serious climbs but in comparison to the mountain one has to climb to get to them they aren't so bad. In reality they are still serious hills regardless of what was before them.

jonathanb715

I don't know, but I was riding with a guy who owns an inclinometer on a 3 mile climb. He kept telling us that we were on an 8% grade, 10% grade, 9% grade, oh, this section is 13%, etc. We finally told him to shut up (by the time he was able to tell us that a section was steep we'd already figured it out).

JB

ekimeno

LOL! I have one of these on my Garmin - its fun to look at, but I never let anyone else know how steep it is - I'm sure they can work out how hard it is on their own.

sam83

Keel Hollow?

eippo1

Ha, that's awesome. It's like a crit where they always yell pothole at the same point on every lap. You just want to yell at them to shut up b/c everyone knows it's there.

For me, hills are are any grade that requires me to change my pedal style, so I don't blow out my knees. We have lots of short steep ones just outside of Boston. If I want long ones, I go to NW CT where I can find 4 mile climbs of over 1000 feet. Those take a while to get up, but are a blast to descend on.

merlinman

toughest hill we have locally is Cougar Mountain - 2.8 miles, 1,200 feet elvation gain and 8% grade (average - in places it will make you weep). Throw this in the middle of a 60 miler ride and it will test you.