What is hilly?

[quixoticgeek]

I often see rides talked of as x distance with y climb, and I know that the higher y is, esp as a proportion of x, the more it's going to hurt. But I'm wondering. What do people think of as reasonable amount of climbing per 100km, before you start to think of the ride as hilly? Riding in .NL, I don't have enough to compare against. I know I've done 200k rides with 43m of climb per 100km... But I've also done a 200km ride with 1250m per 100km, which was very hard, and definitely counted as hilly.

I'm just looking at my 2100km ruska route and it's 13000m of climbing, and wondering how to interpret that...

J

[Kim]

I work on the principle that 1000m of climbing per 100km (so 1%) is normal riding.  More than about 1500m is hilly.  Less than 500m is very flat.

[Peter]

J.,  I think it's almost impossible to make a generalised evaluation.  Partly it depends on where in the ride the climbs are, how tired you are going to be when you tackle them, whether or not the height is gained in a few very steep climbs, or lots of gradual ones and so on.  There are no two ways about the distance - 2100km is a very long way and you are definitely going to get tired.  But 13000m, while it looks like a lot and will certainly be noticed would only be just over half of the climbing required (about 24,500m) to merit a single AAA point over the distance.  I may be wrong on that (I'm a little out of touch!).  There are calculations which allow for climbing points if there are sections which have a lot of climbing in but I hope you get the general picture.

Your 200 would not have qualified for climbing points (only just) but one of the oddities of the system is that if it had had a couple of hundred metres more it might have qualified for 2.75!

Whatever, to me the significant figure is 2100km........!

I don't know if you are a member but this page on the AudaxUK site relates:-

https://audax.uk/awards-pages/audax-altitude-award-aaa/aaa-points/

All the best

Peter

[Pingu]

I work on the principle that 1000m of climbing per 100km (so 1%) is normal riding.  More than about 1500m is hilly.  Less than 500m is very flat.

This.

[grams]

Metres per kilometre is a more common measure I think.

The threshold for AAA on a 200 km is 14. I’d agree with Kim that less than 5 is flat, but 10 can easily be “quite hilly” depending on how sharp the hills are and who is doing the riding.

(There are of course plenty of manly men who will call a 14 flat or “not that hilly”)

[Peter]

And plenty who wouldn't!

[quixoticgeek]

J.,  I think it's almost impossible to make a generalised evaluation.  Partly it depends on where in the ride the climbs are, how tired you are going to be when you tackle them, whether or not the height is gained in a few very steep climbs, or lots of gradual ones and so on.  There are no two ways about the distance - 2100km is a very long way and you are definitely going to get tired.  But 13000m, while it looks like a lot and will certainly be noticed would only be just over half of the climbing required (about 24,500m) to merit a single AAA point over the distance.  I may be wrong on that (I'm a little out of touch!).  There are calculations which allow for climbing points if there are sections which have a lot of climbing in but I hope you get the general picture.

The amount of climbing is distributed across the whole ride pretty evenly, there's a couple of bits of 6-7%, but everything else is sub 5%. I think it's going to feel like never ending false flat...

The biggest issue I find is that when the ride gets that long, the x axis is so compressed on the various graphs, it's hard to see just how significant a climb is.

Your 200 would not have qualified for climbing points (only just) but one of the oddities of the system is that if it had had a couple of hundred metres more it might have qualified for 2.75!

It actually got me 1.75, my only AAA points ever...

Whatever, to me the significant figure is 2100km........!

I don't know if you are a member but this page on the AudaxUK site relates:-

https://audax.uk/awards-pages/audax-altitude-award-aaa/aaa-points/

I am an AUK member, tho I've never ridden an Audax in the UK...

2100 is a lot, but it's only 200 more than my previous longest of 1900... That had about 5000m of climbing, but 4000m of that was in 90km...

Metres per kilometre is a more common measure I think.

The threshold for AAA on a 200 km is 14. I’d agree with Kim that less than 5 is flat, but 10 can easily be “quite hilly” depending on how sharp the hills are and who is doing the riding.

(There are of course plenty of manly men who will call a 14 flat or “not that hilly”)

so 1400m per 100km... ?

J

[Diver300]

FTP is 200 - 300 W for most men. If you are riding all day, I guess that you would be putting out around 150 - 200 W.

Based on riding at 20 kph (12.5 mph) and 150 W going to wind resistance, the 2100 km will take you 105 hours. To climb 13000 m in 105 hours, and assume bike+rider = 100 kg, climbing alone will need 34 W for 105 hours.

If 20 kph uses 150 W of wind resistance, and 34 W is lost to climbing, you are left with 116 W. Assuming the same drag coefficient and still air, that will slow you to 18.3 kph, or stretch your riding of 2100 km out by about 10 hours.

I don't think that is particularly bad. Wind resistance will make a lot more difference in the inevitable headwinds. 13000 m in 2100 km is 619 km per 100 km, so on the Kim scale, that is between flat and normal, so in general agreement with my back-of-an-envelope calculation.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I work on the principle that 1000m of climbing per 100km (so 1%) is normal riding.  More than about 1500m is hilly.  Less than 500m is very flat.

This.

Yep. This is something I've absorbed through audax and elsewhere.

But also what Peter said. It's not just the amount of climbing, but how it's distributed, how steep it is, what the surface is like, whether there's a headwind, whether it's before or after lunch, etc, etc, etc...

[Kim]

Yes, it's a single measure that doesn't tell the whole story.  There's a difference between continually rolling and flat followed by a massive climb.  And there's also a huge difference between a massive climb at a no-drama gradient and one that involves gratuitous chevrons.  And for those of heavy-but-aerodynamic persuasion, there's the question of how much momentum you can conserve:  Rolling hills can become a hard slog if there's a give way line or blind bend at the bottom of each descent.

But I think it's mostly about what you're used to, irrespective of your actual climbing ability.  When I returned to cycling in East London back in 2007, I thought the Bow Flyover was a mountain.  Then I moved to Birmingham and discovered hills.  Wind was (at least until I lost a significant proportion of my body weight during the pandemic) a mere nuisance, except on rare visits to the flatlands, where it suddenly mattered.

I have a rule of thumb for fully-loaded touring that about 80km/day is reasonable if you want to have time to stop and look at things (much more than 100km and it turns into an audax), and it's best to get the Big Climb or Comedy Off-Roading done in the first half of the day.  That's mostly psychology, but it also gives you a bit more scope to make up time or take it easy later on.

[freeflow]

The real question is not how hilly is a ride but how hard is the climbing.  What's the difference between a 200km ride that gains 2000m at 10m/km and a  flat 200km ride that gains 2000m in the last km

[Peter]

J.,  I think you're going to go anyway, so I hope you enjoy it!  In my brief Audax career, I almost always rode because I wanted to see the scenery.  I'd find a way to get up the hills for the sake of the views, though I admit I enjoyed climbing, even when it defeated me.  This was helped by living where I live!

Good luck - is it the Ruska ride you have in mind?

[quixoticgeek]

FTP is 200 - 300 W for most men. If you are riding all day, I guess that you would be putting out around 150 - 200 W.

Really? 300w is substantial as an FTP. At least for an amateur...

What about for women ?

J

[quixoticgeek]

Good luck - is it the Ruska ride you have in mind?

Yep.

Finland is flat they say... I'm not so sure...

J

[Rod Marton]

I've very little experience of cycling in Finland but I have ridden across Karelia, which I would expect to have a similar landscape. I could best describe it as rocky, there are lots of lakes with short sharp climbs over ridges between them. None of the climbs were very long, at most 20 - 30m gain in elevation, not big enough to count as hills but the repetition does get to your legs after a while. So I'd still count that as a flat ride.

[Paul H]

I'm just looking at my 2100km ruska route and it's 13000m of climbing, and wondering how to interpret that...

J

I'd say that's normal, not looking for hills, but not avoiding them either, If I look at any of my tours, that's probably a little over the average, but not by much:
UK E2E 1,600km 9,000m
Derby > Barcelona 1,800km  7,000m
Calais > Bilbao 1,400km 6,000m...
I expect my pre GPS tours will have all worked out about the same, I haven't looked. If you put two random European points into some mapping software, that far apart, I'd expect a similar figure.
As others have said how hilly you find it depends on the distribution, and even then different scenarios will suite different riders.  I'm happy to sit on a gentle slope all day, but a succession of short sharp climbs will have me grovelling. 

[grams]

Really? 300w is substantial as an FTP. At least for an amateur...

300W FTP is proper fast club rider territory assuming reasonable kgs. And putting out a continuous 150W for 105 hours would still be a challenge for such a person.

The maths in that post are valid if you were riding a constant slope at constant speed and power output, but pretty useless otherwise.

The cool thing about bicycles is that because most energy goes to wind resistance and that follows a power law, a rider putting out half as many watts isn't reduced to half the speed, so you can still finish in reasonable time on a fraction of someone else's watts.

[quixoticgeek]

This is the komoot elevation graph for my current draft route from CP2 to CP3:



And this is a zoomed in 100km segment for 300-400km of the above:



I'm just not sure how to read the graphs any more...

Really? 300w is substantial as an FTP. At least for an amateur...

300W FTP is proper fast club rider territory assuming reasonable kgs. And putting out a continuous 150W for 105 hours would still be a challenge for such a person.

The maths in that post are valid if you were riding a constant slope at constant speed and power output, but pretty useless otherwise.

The cool thing about bicycles is that because most energy goes to wind resistance and that follows a power law, a rider putting out half as many watts isn't reduced to half the speed, so you can still finish in reasonable time on a fraction of someone else's watts.

I don't have a powermeter, so can't picture how much power relates to speed. I do know that I can push a 160bpm heart rate all day while averaging a 20-20.5kph average, with wind...

I don't do much climbing, but I have done headwinds for 600km before...

J

[Diver300]

Really? 300w is substantial as an FTP. At least for an amateur...

300W FTP is proper fast club rider territory assuming reasonable kgs. And putting out a continuous 150W for 105 hours would still be a challenge for such a person.

The maths in that post are valid if you were riding a constant slope at constant speed and power output, but pretty useless otherwise.

I used the FTP to get in the right ball-park of how much energy would be used just getting past the air.

I agree that it assumes a constant slope, which won't be the case, not least because riding a bike 13000 m above sea level involves other problems.

The net climb is used because the energy gained in downslopes is lost to wind resistance as the speed goes up. Even with no wind resistance, 30 mph will only get you 10 m up a slope, so nearly all the climbing energy has to come from the rider.

I think it's valid to compare the net energy lost to wind resistance to the energy lost to climbing hills. For this route, it looks like about 25 % will go to hill climbing, and that's less than a 10% loss of speed if it were averaged out. The details will be very dependent on the profile, but wind direction will make more difference.

[Blade]

My personal definition of a hilly ride is one that exceeds 100 metres of climbing for every 5 miles ridden.

E.G. a fifty mile ride with over 1,000 metres of climbing.

[quixoticgeek]

My personal definition of a hilly ride is one that exceeds 100 metres of climbing for every 5 miles ridden.

E.G. a fifty mile ride with over 1,000 metres of climbing.

Beautiful mixing of metric and imperial there :p

Had to convert. Does that make 100m per 8.1km ?

J

[Cudzoziemiec]

It makes it 21 and a quarter rods per 8.1km.

When you think that UK road signs are in miles and OS maps have contours in metres, it all makes sense. Sometimes. 

[markcjagar]

For me, someone who lives in Sheffield and primarily rides in the Peak, a hilly ride is ~2000m elevation in 100km.

[quixoticgeek]

For me, someone who lives in Sheffield and primarily rides in the Peak, a hilly ride is ~2000m elevation in 100km.

That sounds Brutal!

J

[woollypigs]

Also depends on what you are used to riding. I have been out with forumers who said these two version :

A: "there is a hill coming up, be ready" and miles later I asked when the hill is coming up.
B: "this is the flattest route around here" and the next day I couldn't walk normally.