First true climb kicked my butt.
 

So last weekend I visited New Paltz, NY and had a try at the climb up to Mohonk Mountain. It's approx 4.4 miles most of which i believe is 8% or more. I don't have a fancypants computer that will allow me to post up data but that was what was reading on my computer.

Wow was that hard! I know I suck because I have only ridden maybe twice in the last two months due to a new family addition being born June 2nd. I always thought 1000 feet every 10 miles was a lot, but this was like 1000 feet in four miles. Kicked my butt.

Would this be considered a hard climb?

Congrats on new addition.

I was also in New Paltz last weekend, and drove that route heading home. I kept telling my wife I wanted to ride it, because it looks like a great climb. I don't think that it is an 8% grade overall, only in spots, and is more likely a 4-5%. Still a nice climb. Coming from the Finger Lakes, it looked like a hard climb to me.

If you plug it into MapMyRide it should give you an approximate percentage and a UCI category rating. There's a climb in Greenville, SC that kicks my butt. It's about 1000 ft in 3.2 miles and rated Category 3. I can't imagine what a HC climb would be like!

Apparently.

Here are the climbs in that area.. they look hard enough.

http://app.strava.com/segments/explo...p_type/terrain

8% grade is definitely no joke.

4 miles @ 8% average grade is a vigorous climb. 5% average, not so much.

Whether it's vigorous or not depends on what you put into it. You can turn yourself inside-out on any 5% climb of decent length if you try.

I just got back from a week in Colorado and did my first true climbs. I was in Frisco and rode the casual stuff in the valley between Dillon and Breckenridge. I'm not gonna lie... I didn't dare attempt Hoosier Pass. Two problems with it: no shoulder most of the time, and intermittent monsoon rain. I'm a flatlander and I'm not taking my chances descending an alpine climb in the rain.

The first 24 hours was brutal since Frisco is 9,000 feet and Wichita is 1,500. After 48 hours I felt better, and by the end of the trip I was relatively but not totally fine.

The climbs I did do were manageable with proper pacing. They were not 8% for 4.4 miles, which I'm pretty sure is Cat1 or HC if you are not exaggerating, but I did several shorter cat 2 and 3.

I used a 50/34 and 11-26 drivetrain. I actually had an 11-32 cassette but found to my displeasure that my bike has a Rival short cage, not medium as the build sheet from CC says it should have. :mad: However, it was a family vacation and my 62 y-o father in law needed the 11-32 more than me, and it worked great on his Apex-equipped bike.

That is a serious climb. We go up to mohonk quite a bit and our old Camry nearly crapped out! There are also a lot of sharp turns that kill your momentum.

Stunning views, though...

Same goes for the flats.

The issue with hills is you eventually reach a grade where you can't maintain a reasonable cadence with the gearing you have. Plus you can never let up. You can ride harder for awhile, but eventually your muscles burn up.

5-8% is a respectable moderately-hard climb, but at 1000feet of elevation, wouldn't be considered a major climb due to the overall shorter length.Where I am in Norcal, near Palo Alto, that would be considered a small (but real) climb as done in isolation.

Line up a few of those en route so you're getting 4000+ feet of climbing, now we're talking respectably tough climbing.

I've noticed that a lot of casual riders coast frequently-- anywhere from 10-40% of the time on flat ground. You can't do that when climbing. You have to be conditioned to pedal something very near 100% of the time, which is something best learned when climbing or by pacing riders faster than you are.

I was doing half-mile 8% climbs around 7mph. It was manageable for me, and I'm nowhere near awesome. My wife was right behind me. :)

Just a quick FYI: the UCI does not rate climbs. Climb rankings are always at the discretion of the particular race promoter and what they put into their "race bible". In fact, the same climb can have different rankings dependent upon when/where in the stage/race it occurs.

MapyMyRide does at least have a consistent formula for ranking climbs, but it has nothing to do with UCI or Pro-Tour races.

Yes, a lot depends on how you manage the climb. A flat road can kick your butt if you are doing intervals and a hill can be some what easy if you ride slowly in an easy gear.

Once you're over 8%, every hill is a pretty decent effort. Fortunately, most hills don't last too long at that incline. But I find that even at 5%, I have to put up a reasonable effort to stay moving - if I take it truly easy, I'll be going nearly nowhere.

This is Bike Forums. Any hill with an average grade < 20% can be tackled by any rider (except the embarrassingly weak) with a standard double and an 11-21.

That's a good point. I seem to remember a thread by a newbie who described his pedaling like a pelican flying: flap flap flap coooooaaaaasssssttttt. :)

It's also another argument in favor of riding a fixed gear in the off season. Not just up hills, but also on long flat rides. You literally have to keep pedaling for the entire ride and that trains your legs to keep turning over.

Agreed. I do a lot of hill climbing. If the hill is not very long, I can climb some very steep grades but if we are talking about a 2 or 3 mile hill, then even a gradual climb kicks my butt.

Exactly what happened to me. I was fine for a little bit but then my legs just felt like like lead weights. I know I could have done better had I ate right, slept well the night before and had some more time in the saddle with the weeks leading up to it. I'm not saying I could have made it up without stopping but I know I could have been stronger. Trying to climb it in 39-25 just wasn't happening. At least a passing motorist asked if I was ok when stopped pouring a bottle over my head on the side of the road. Haha.

I just looked up the area, and mapped it on www.mapmyride.com

If you climbed "Mountain Rest Rd.", it's 2.5 miles averaging 7.5% grade. That's a pretty good climb.

My best to date is an elevation gain of 1,840' in 8.6 miles averaging only 6mph. Average is only 4.1%, but there's lots of 10%-13% to make up for the somewhat flat spots, and even a few short 16% inclines.

http://app.strava.com/activities/10369166#181954438

Not too bad for a big, fat guy, though.

While it takes a certain amount of conditioning to climb grades like that at all, it's possible that you were just going too fast or that your climbing technique needs some work.

Alarms should be going off anytime someone asks you if you're OK -- that's how others tell you that you're not OK.

8% is challenging on 39-25 but eminently doable by most. Just go slower.

I find that even on prolonged climbs, that gearing is sufficient for nearly everything. You do suffer on late-stage crazy steep stuff (Bohlman/On Orbit in Norcal at the end, 21+% in the final stretch!) but it's still doable as long as you keep the cadence real, real slow.

Your chosen gearing, not the climb, kicked your butt.

It took me a while to figure that out. I was on a ride a few weeks ago with a friend that had to get off the bike and walk for a bit. It was a tough climb for him at 6%, and he was cramping bad. I figured I'd stay on the bike and pace him from behind (and stop and take photos here and there, then catch up again). For a good period of time, I was in the 48x12 combo and moving at a slow walking speed. Cadence was probably around 20 rpm? I was actually surprised how easy it was.