altitude

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.
Amanda P

Amanda P

Legendary Member
Location
York. Well, York-ish...
Deceptive hills: yes. Used to live at the top of one, here.

Stonehill.jpg


When you ride west along Stonehill Road, it's flat. When you ride east, it's very definitely uphill all the way.

What was worse was that in the dark, it used to be almost impossible to see the entrance to my road on the right, so on some foggy nights I'd ride half a mile or more, still uphill, past it before I realised I'd missed it.
 
Arch

Arch

Married to Night Train
Location
Salford, UK
You'll have to tell, or it'll drive me mad - on the left hand edge, is that a 'Spacious' Pond, or a 'Gracious' one?
 
Tynan

Tynan

Veteran
Location
e4
try Wadham road in E4

into work is a gentle and welcome downhill

coming back it looks dead flat but it needs effort to keep speed up, annoying
 
J

Johnny Thin

New Member
When I used to commute into Brum from Stourbridge, both at about the same elevation. But going in there are 2 notably long, steep hills compared to steadier gradients on the return home, this always knocked a good 1mph off the average speed, all other things being equal.
 
OP
OP
B

bonj2

Guest
snorri said:
After strenuous denial, there now appears to be an acceptance on your part of conventional wisdom regarding prevailing winds.;)
Click to expand...

er... no. The wind can't be relied upon to be southerly, it's normally quite random what direction the wind is blowing in. It doesn't normally change within the space of only a few hours (save for localised gusts), but it's generally different from one day to the next.
I'm only 10 mins quicker on the way home WHEN and IF the wind is southerly, i didn't say that was always / generally the case.
 
Tetedelacourse

Tetedelacourse

New Member
Location
Rosyth
bonj said:
I just went on gmaps-pedometer.com and found out some quite interesting things, about my commute to, and from, work.
Firstly I would have guessed that my work and home are about on the same level, but it turns out that work is at 472 ft a.s.l, and home is at 170 ft a.s.l.
So you would think I would be a lot quicker to get home than to get there, but it's almost the same - sometimes about 10 mins shorter but i think that's more often due to southerly tailwind (home is north work is south.)
Secondly that my normal route BACK from work involves about 600ft of climbing (and obviously therefore about 900 ft of descending).
... this is the route i have always taken, and is the route i take when i'm driving aswell, and is the route that viamichelin.com recommends. But I have just put the route that google.co.uk recommends with 'avoid highways' ticked into gmap-pedometer and it would appear to involve only about 65ft of climbing! i.e. only about a tenth as much... this route is slightly longer, but only by about a mile. So i'm wondering whether it will be quicker? i'm hopefully going to try it tomorrow! bid me luck in not taking a wrong turning...

anyhow i guess the point of this thread is that while we all know that "from x to y is a bitch of a climb" and "from a to b is always a fun descent", it's actually interesting to note the altitude profile of our routes as a whole, and more importantly quite good to know the absolute altitude of various points so we can tell without having done a route how much climbing and how much descending there'll be...

comments? anyone else done any similar analysis?
Click to expand...

How do you get elevation and total climbing from Gmap?
 
OP
OP
B

bonj2

Guest
Tetedelacourse said:
How do you get elevation and total climbing from Gmap?
Click to expand...

on the left it's got
"Elevation: off small large"
underneath
"Turn off mile markers
Turn on calorie counter"

it doesn't 'give' you total climbing, i just guesstimate it from plotting one point that i know is the bottom of a hill, plotting another that i know is the top, and then looking at the resulting triangle at the bottom, and look at the difference.
 
Tetedelacourse

Tetedelacourse

New Member
Location
Rosyth
A-ha. Thanks mon ami.

Quite surprised to find out where the highest point in my commute is - I didn't think it'd be there but then it's fairly sheltered so I don't usually get and headwind, so I probably consider it less difficult than other lower parts.

Actually scratch that. I now realise my biggest climb is where I thought it was, which is of course different from highest point on commute.

It would be useful if you could click on a point in your route and a corresponding marker would show up on the profile pane.

Cheers for this - that's my day sorted!
 
Tetedelacourse

Tetedelacourse

New Member
Location
Rosyth
sorry another question - how do you know the profile is in feet and not metres? This would make a massive difference - I think I'll assume metres for maximum self-satisfaction until told otherwise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom