Hill Repeats
I used to like to climb. And of course I thought I was ok at it. Not great, but better than some others. That was a long time ago. It was back when there was a 1500' over 3.5 mile climb was in pretty much out my front door step. I used to do that hill at least once a week if not more. But then I moved to Minnesota. Where it's cold in the winter. And it's pretty flat. Well not totally. There are hills. Just different types of hills than what I like.
The hills here are mainly ones you want to power over. In a race or group ride, if you can't keep the momentum going over, you're toast. And I have been toast a huge amount of time. See I was climbing where, you get into your own rythem and see others blow-up cause they went to hard. Here, you have to go hard cause there's no way they are boing to blow-up on such a short climb.
You have to be able to power up a climb here and recover at speed in time to prepare for the next one. So ... while I still would like to work on (relativly) slow steady climbs (I'll cover how to do this when there's no real long climbs to climb.), I'll be working on short power climbs by doing hill repeats.
To do hill repeats (at least one of the ways I do them, I'm sure there are others), find a route with a hill that you can climb in less than 5 minutes, and allows you to turnaround or loop around to do it again. Get a decent warm up in and then attack the hill. Try not to stop at the top, but continue to go hard over the crest. Then recover going back down. Try to repeat this a couple times. Maybe start with 3, then 4, then 5. But make sure you attack the climb. Keep your cadence up, but don't get in too easy of a gear that you lose momentum.
What you see above is my heart rate and elevation over 4 repeats. Each time my heart rate went into the 90% range, though I should have tried to go a little harder to get into 95%.
What you will also see is 3x rolling sprints near the end of my ride, where I got into about or over 85%. What you don't see on the sprints is that I was riding the orange fixedwheel and was hitting over 140 rpm cadence, topping out at 161 on the first one.
trainingtrainingcyclingcyclinghillhillrepeatsrepeatsheart+rateheart+rateHRHRclimbingclimbingworkoutworkoutgogobikebikefixed+gearfixed+gearfixedwheelfixedwheel
Thursday 04/03/2008 | 11:07 am
Bradly Fletchall on Thursday 04/03/2008 | 01:01 pm
Thats a pretty cool graph of your performance...what are you using to collect the data?
Living in Central Missouri their aren't a lot of long hills here either. As I'm building my base right now I'll start doing hill repeats later this spring the same way you describe them here. They seem to work pretty well for me in the past.
Gunnar on Thursday 04/03/2008 | 02:10 pm
I started using a Garmin Edge 305HR+Cad in January. I take it and upload it into Sporttracks for analysis. Sporttracks has a cool plugin called GPS2powertrack that will give you a general idea of power output (I call it a power score) at any point during the ride. It's a really cool peice of software, and I think it's compatible with other equipment. (powermeters, heart rate monitors, etc.)
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