Attacking hills - Cycling Mob: Road Cycling, Mountain Biking and More

07-26-2004, 11:21 AM

Well, now I'm a little intimidated by the guy who posted a thread asking
how to increase speed. Cuz I wanted to post a long dreamy note about my
experiences with attacking hills this morning as a means of increasing
my speed (I googled and found some posts recommending this). But my
average speed is 14-15 mph on a reasonably flat road, and that guy is
doing 17-18 on rolling hills. (I do NOT want admit what my average
speed on rolling hills is!) Now, granted, he's probably riding a road
bike, and I'm still chugging along on my ridiculously heavy hybrid
(when, oh WHEN are the 2005's coming in! *cry*); he's been riding, um,
"over the last year," and I've only been at this 2 months; and I'm
guessing he's considerably younger than I am.

So it is with great trepidation that timidly report that I was able to
get up hills at least 50% faster by attacking them, some of them 100%
faster, and increased my average speed for the entire ride by 1.3 mi/hr
(around 16 miles). This is a HUGE improvement for me. These were all
rolling hills, not too big, all preceded by a nice downhill to gather
speed -- what I did was stay in the big gear I'd been in on the downhill
and stand up to dance on the pedals as long as I could take it without
downshifting. This got me at least halfway up most of them before I'd
have to back off a little, sit back in the saddle and downshift. This
got me up all but one hill on the large chainring; the one I couldn't
manage, I only dropped to the middle chainring. I was blowing pretty
hard at the tops of the hills, but I made them in what was for me record
time. I was psyched.

Before some of you jump all over me, yes, I know how to downshift on a
hill, and no, I didn't do any cross-chaining. I don't want to wear down
the teeth on my chainrings and cogs prematurely. Yada yada. Standard
disclaimers apply. Etc etc etc. ;-)

I am quite pleased with these results. I'm definitely going to continue
attacking hills and see what kind of progress I can make.

-km

--
the black rose
proud to be owned by a yorkie
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