The Annual Lunacy Climbing Challenge Chatzone

[ColinJ]

Okay... This thread has now morphed into the chatzone, and I have created the 2021 Annual Lunacy Climbing Challenge thread.

I hope that we get 10+ riders having a go this year. I probably won't do any qualifying rides until late February/early March unless I get back on my bike ASAP and the weather gets better.

I stand a much better chance of completing this challenge than the longer ones I have failed recently because I can do suitable qualifying loops in only about 3 hours from home. I often do 1,000+ m on my rides, or fall just short. With this challenge in mind, I won't finish many rides with only 700-800 metres of ascent done, I will add the extra climb needed to get my total up to the target.

 

[Sharky]

Logged my first ride today. A long way short of the qualifying criteria. 1147 ft in 15 miles/90mins. I adapted one of my short loops and took every opportunity to descend following a climb so that I could re ascend up the next parallel road. Took me down some roads that I had never bothered with, so made a refreshing change.

But it is a harsh reality that it's going to take me 3 times the time and 3 times the distance at 10mph to achieve a qualifying time. That would make it 45 miles and 4.5 hours. There are a couple of major climbs that I will be including on the extended version of this loop, so will see what that brings.

Even if I don't hit the criteria, really enjoyed today's effort and makes a change from just going round my normal loops.

 

[ColinJ]

But it is a harsh reality that it's going to take me 3 times the time and 3 times the distance at 10mph to achieve a qualifying time. That would make it 45 miles and 4.5 hours. There are a couple of major climbs that I will be including on the extended version of this loop, so will see what that brings.

I am very slow on hilly routes too, but I can cram steep hills much closer together round here so I reckon I should be able to do my rides in less than 3 hours.

 

[Sharky]

This challenge is getting addictive. Did my 2nd ride today. More or less the same route as last time, but took a very tiny detour to take in another hill that I've never ridden up before. Distance extra. 0.57miles and gave me 108ft extra and HR up to 16!

Havent logged it as still a long way to go to meet the full criteria. Up to 1255 ft in 15.09 miles.

 

[ColinJ]

I'm still barely riding my bike and pretty unfit. It will take me a few weeks to get back some of the fitness that I have lost.

I don't want to ride my best bike at this time of year, and 2 of my other bikes are out of action. That only leaves my singlespeed bike and I certainly won't be doing challenging hilly rides on that!

By the time that Spring comes, I should be going back up the local hills.

 

[gbs]

I am now past my period of wishing to prove to myself that there is still life in the old legs and hesitate to comment. Nonetheless, how about setting the qualifying requirement for rides of 1500/2000/2500 m vertical gain? Those who like to collect points would say 1/2/3 points according to the vertical gain. Simple and doable for the flat landers of Surrey and Kent and elsewhere. BTW, I applaud the relaxation of the every month rule.

 

[ColinJ]

Nonetheless, how about setting the qualifying requirement for rides of 1500/2000/2500 m vertical gain?

So 1.5x, 2x, and 3x the current qualifying requirement - I'm not sure how that would help flatlanders...

Assuming that you meant feet of ascent... I think it would be odd to reduce the amount of climbing in a climbing challenge so that people with no hills could do it!

Maybe the relaxation could be that if you genuinely don't have enough hills within a sensible distance of you to do each hill only once, you could opt to do hill repeats but only as necessary. For instance, if you can find a collection of small climbs totalling 500 metres, do that set twice? (Don't forget, you can already do them once in each direction so you only really have to find 500 metres worth, then turn round and come back.)

 

[gbs]

Colin, I meant metres to set, for me at least, a real challenge. I haven't absorbed the full detail of yr proposal but I foresee: a) difficulty in complying with no repeat type restrictions in my particular backyard and b) the need to create a detailed planned route - I prefer to have a series of way points and to improvise the routes in between. I find the sort of route that DogT plotted on his trainer admirable for training purposes but it would not appeal in the "real world", lacking in the appeal of a objectives such as a cafe or landmark. I should say that I would rely upon Garmin to give real time vertical gain data and so would add an adhoc hill if deficient in vertical gain and hence could be relatively carefree as to route.

 

[ColinJ]

Colin, I meant metres to set, for me at least, a real challenge. I haven't absorbed the full detail of yr proposal but I foresee: a) difficulty in complying with no repeat type restrictions in my particular backyard and b) the need to create a detailed planned route - I prefer to have a series of way points and to improvise the routes in between. I find the sort of route that DogT plotted on his trainer admirable for training purposes but it would not appeal in the "real world", lacking in the appeal of a objectives such as a cafe or landmark. I should say that I would rely upon Garmin to give real time vertical gain data and so would add an adhoc hill if deficient in vertical gain and hence could be relatively carefree as to route.

Ah, well it wasn't really intended to be a 'maximum elevation gain' challenge. You only have to look at the kind of figures posted by the likes of @Sea of vapours (or even me in one of my better non-Covid years) and you will see that we regularly knock up 2,000+ metres in our longer rides so we would achieve this challenge without even trying.

I was thinking more in terms of very intense shorter rides. Something to aim for perhaps when riding time is a bit more limited.

I have it in my mind to see if I can find a route to get my 1,000 metres in in 30 kms or less. I have already worked out routes that can achieve it in the low-30s but beating 30 km would be pretty difficult.

There is nothing to stop you defining your own targets/rules though. I'm not going to come round and deflate your tyres if your plan is a bit different to mine! Just add a disclaimer - "I like the idea of a climbing challenge, but have adapted the suggested rules to suit myself!"

 

[gbs]

Colin, Apologies for blundering around yr challenge concept. Enjoy the Spring.

 

[Dogtrousers]

I've bagged my first ride. I managed 1,174m in 49km. That's 24 m/km, or 2.4% overall.

An insanely convoluted route trying to make the best of every road that goes up Sydenham Hill (Crystal Palace) and associated lumps.

Given the constraints of the challenge I doubt that this can be bettered anywhere inside the M25. I actually clocked up 1000m in about 40.5km, but the constraints of starting and finishing in the same place dragged the overall down a bit.

 

[ColinJ]

Excellent effort, and suitably mad!

My fitness is pretty poor at the moment. The illnesses (Covid or otherwise) that I have had over the past 12 months have left me feeling distinctly sub-par. I know that I am not fit, but it has been more than just that - getting out of breath walking up one flight of stairs is not normal even for an unfit me! Still, I am on the mend so I aim to get more riding done over the next month or so of (hopefully) less wintry weather, ready to start tackling the 2 Lunacy challenges.

 

[Dogtrousers]

My ride also provided a lesson in why it's important to stick to a single method for estimating elevations. I planned the ride in RWGPS and stuck closely to the route. I uploaded it to RWGPS, and also to Strava to see what it made of it. The results:

RWGPS Route planner: 49.2 km 1,023 m
RWGPS ride upload: 49.0 km 1,174 m (This is my personal "system of record")
Strava ride upload: 49.01 km 1,152 m

So the route planner is quite cautious in estimating ascent. That's not altogether surprising as the elevation data it has will be relatively coarse compared to taking a GPS out and measuring it along the route.

Strava is more stingy in its smoothing. Strava is a bit weird in that I don't think it trusts elevation data in an uploaded file unless it can tell that it comes from a device with a barometric altimeter. I uploaded a tcx file and I don't think that specifies the recording device. It certainly doesn't appear on the ride page.

 

[ColinJ]

Planning/measuring is a tricky one... I know that routes plotted with Memory Map (digital OS maps) can come in at about 10-20% or so over what people's GPS devices register, but a GPS device's total ascent figure can also be out. My Garmin sometimes thinks that my front door goes up or down by up to 40-50 metres in the course of one local ride!

I will probably plan for 1,100+ metres and see what the Garmin says on the ride. The question is what to do if MM says something like 1,123 m but the Garmin only reads 964 metres by the end of the loop...

PS In fact, I will probably plot the profiles and manually calculate the total. A lot of the time the biggest errors come from roads along steep hillsides (a small lateral error makes the software think the route is far down the hillside), passing over high bridges (the software ignores the bridge and looks at the elevation of the terrain below), and so on.

I plotted one route and the elevation profile showed a big dip on a smooth descent. I had done that road hundreds of times so I knew that it was not actually there...

The red line on the profile shows the actual slope of the A58 down towards Littleborough, but you can see that the software thinks that there is a big dip adding a phantom 8 metres of ascent. The red circle on the map surrounds the culprit. It took me years to spot that there is a small valley running under the road with a stream at the bottom. The road is built up on a high culvert but it isn't obvious unless you look for it...

These phantom descents/ascents explain the mapping software exaggerating the total.

 

[Dogtrousers]

My experience is that the planner I use (RWGPS) gives a lower figure. But I don't consider these differences to be due to "errors". It's not wrong, it's just a different method of estimation. Perfectly good and consistent but only to be used to compare with like measurements. It's just necessary to bear in systematic bias with respect to other ways of estimating or you could end up at the end of your loop a few metres short of 1,000.

As far as I'm concerned the figure that RWGPS gives me when I upload the ride is 100% unquestionably right. Simply because that's the one I've decided to use, and for no other reason.

I don't think that manual calculation will give you a quantitatively better figure than any other. Just another method of estimation with its own biases.