Closing Down The Gap

So today, one of my cycling buddies, Dennis Pedersen, and I started a new fall/winter training program that will include climbing up Page Mill Road on Wednesdays, starting at about noon. Neither one of us had ever climbed UP Page Mill, even though both of us thought we had descended Page Mill in the far, distant past.

Our plan was simple - we wanted to do 2 relatively hard efforts (about 90% of your max heartrate) for 20 minutes each. When Dennis and I met on Old Page Mill at noon, I told him I might cheat a little and only put out about 85% of my max heartrate, since I'm typically a little conservative when doing a climb for the first time - I like to "scope it out", so to speak - get an idea of all the little nuances of the climb, like where it hurts the most - like those dang switchback turns that often hit 15% to 20%, unless you cheat and swing over to the wrong side of the road to flatten the bend a bit - but this can be dangerous, and is not particularly recommended - traffic coming down the mountain will be going a lot faster than you are going up the mountain!

And I had already "virtually" scoped out the climb by analyzing various people that had uploaded their ride data to MotionBased.com - what a cool site! I have a Garmin Edge 305 cyclometer - and anyone that has a Garmin can upload their data to MotionBased.com, which has much better software for analyzing your data than the stock software that comes with your Garmin (their Training Center program).

I had also driven up Page Mill several times, as it happens to be one of the "escape routes" when I commute home from San Mateo. If I get to the Page Mill exit on Hwy 280 and see a long line of cars parked on the freeway, I will often decide to take "the scenic route" home, going up Page Mill to Skyline, then Skyline to Black Rd, and down Black Rd to Hwy 17, where I latch back onto the freeway system and scoot on over to Scotts Valley, where I live.

So, the combination of having driven up Page Mill, and looking at the MotionBased.com data from different cyclists that had gone up Page Mill allowed me to inform Dennis that I had a basic game plan for attacking Page Mill to get our 2 20-minute workouts.

Here's the profile of the climb up Page Mill: The first 1.0 mile (starting at Arastradero) is fairly mild - just a 3% average grade or so. Then, from mile 1.0 to mile 4.5, it kicks up fairly strong (this is the hardest section of Page Mill, no doubt). In that 3.5 miles, you gain about 1500 feet, so the average grade is between 9% and 10% - and that's just the average! There are spots that hit 15% to 20% (yep - those damn switchbacks!). Then, after you hit the 4.5 mile mark, the next mile is fairly easy (back to a reasonable - and pleasing - 4% average grade). Then, the last 3 miles, from mile 5.5 to mile 8.5 is a series of uphill rollers, i.e., rollers that keep getting you up higher and higher. You climb another 600 feet in that 3 miles, which is an average grade of just 4% again - but they are rollers, so the aveage is a little misleading. Still, the top half of Page Mill is a piece of cake, compared to that tough 3.5 mile section you slog through between mile 1.0 and mile 4.5, for sure!

So I proposed a gameplan to Dennis - we go fairly mild for the first mile, then when the road starts to kick up, we do our 20-minute interval, which should get us to somewhere around the 4.0 mile mark. Then, we go easy for 5 minutes and do the last 20 minutes hard again.

Well, Dennis stuck to the plan, almost exactly as I mapped it out. He got to the 4.0 mile mark in just about 20 minutes (that is, 20 minutes after I said, "Go!", which was at the 1.0 mile spot of the climb). Then, he patiently waited for me to arrive, which was about 3 minutes later, we calculated. You see, even though Dennis got to the 4.0 mile mark as instructed, I was lagging behind, since I'm not climbing quite as strong as Dennis (that's an understatement!). So, when my 20 minutes were up, I was only at the 3.5 mile mark. It took me another 3 minutes to do that 1/2 mile to get to where Dennis had kindly parked himself, waiting patiently for me.

So we discussed what we had experienced so far and decided that Dennis would most likely do the rest of the climb in just another 20 minutes or so. And I would most likely take a few more minutes than that, again! So we started off rather easy, which is actually hard to do, since we had another 1/2 mile of steeper grades before we got to the "easy" part of Page Mill, at mile 4.5 - and after a couple of minutes, Dennis blasted off ahead of me, to head for the top.

And, right on schedule, he got to the top in 20 minutes (after going easy for 2 minutes with me).

And me? Well, I kind of cheated again and didn't really push it at 90% of my max heartrate - it was more like just 80% to 85% - so I lost a couple of minutes for the last half of the climb. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for you to do this, since Page Mill really lets up for those last couple of miles.

So, how did we do? Well, we figured out that Dennis probably did the entire climb in about 46 minutes or so - and I had an actual, official time: 53:31 - not too shabby, all things considered.

I believe that Dennis can do the climb in about 42 minutes, if he made an all-out effort for the entire climb. To see why, just check out the times of the guys that did Old La Honda (OLH) in last year's LKHC (week 2) and compare to their times on the Page Mill climb (week 6):

http://www.lowkey.djconnel.com/2006/week2/results.html

http://www.lowkey.djconnel.com/2006/week6/results.html

Check out, for example, the times of Ron Brunner, Fred Stamm, and Peter Tapscott:

RB -- 20:18 (OLH) --- 41:46 (Page Mill)
FS -- 20:03 (OLH) --- 42:53 (Page Mill)
PT -- 19:58 (OLH) --- 41:20 (Page Mill)

It looks like the algorithm for converting OLH times to Page Mill times is pretty simple:

Page Mill time = (OLH time + 1:00) * 2

Since Dennis did 19:50 on OLH last week (when I did that disasterous time of 27:02), there's every reason to expect his Page Mill time would have been right there, in the 42 minute range.

And, today's result on Page Mill backs up my algorithm - I did 53:30, but I'm pretty sure it could have easily done about 52 minutes if I had pushed a little harder on the top half.

So, reversing the algorithm, you get an OLH time for me of about 25 minutes ( 52/2 - 1 ), which is what I was telling Dennis earlier today - I don't think my time last week was a good baseline - 27:02 - I know I had lost my climbing legs over the last couple of months, but I figured that was good for a 2 minute loss on OLH, and not 4 minutes!

See? I'm a genius, right?

On the other hand, if I can get back to my OLH time of about 23 minutes (doable in the next couple of months), then my Page Mill time should end up in the 48 minute range.

So, this means I'll end up about 6 minutes behind Dennis, when I get my climbing legs back in the next month or two.

But by that time, Dennis will have most likely be approaching the OLH times of someone like David Kelly - he did 17:53 last year in week 2 of the LKHC. And, his Page Mill time was a very respectable time of 37:35 ( (18+1) * 2 = 38 ).

So even as I get better, so will Dennis - and the gap will still be there.

Or will it?

Obviously, I have a lot more room for improvement than Dennis does - we'll both reach some natural limit to our improvement - I just hope that I can end up close enough to him so we can work together in a few races next year, tearing the legs off all those guys that spent their fall and winter months watching football and pigging out during Thanksgiving and Xmas...

Well, I still like to dream, anyway... :)