Subject: RE: Climbing Hills and getting faster AdventureBear - 2010-05-16 6:01 PM If you are happy with your speed on flat, but not on hills, then you need to improve your power to weight ratio to get better on the hills. If you are also not happy with your speed on flats, you need to improve power overall. How long are the hills on your route, especially on your race course? Are they hills that take only 2-3 minutes to climb or do they take 10 minutes to climb? Are you using any sort of measures to guage your intensity while riding? heart rate? RPE? Power? Speed? Building in some easy interval workouts, even on the flats, will help raise your overall power output, which will help on the hills. Since hills are power to weight ratio, if you can lose some weight while you are at it, that will help too. 40-60 miles a week is not a ton of miles, but there are lots of itneresting ways to get faster if that is the time limit you have for riding. Overall, I would like to improve my power. I could stand to be much faster on flats also, but my hills are horrible. Yesterday, I probably had some 10 minutes climbs. I could hold about 8-10mph, while everyone else was leaving me behind, probably in the 13-15mph range. I believe the OLY will be more like 8-10 minute climbs. I'm using a HRM while riding. I haven't done a formal TT, but have an educated guess on a LT. Immediatly upon climbing the hills, my HR shoots up between the 175-180 range. My overall fitness could be a limitor here also. I monitor the speed/cadence also, as I have the Garmin 305. You can check out my last ride and the HR breakdown in my logs. I have some pretty powerful legs, so I figure that I should be able to leverage those for cycling. I'm working on my weight, as I'm at about 193 right now. I'm looking to get down to 180 this summer. |