Why I Want To Climb OLH in 19:10

For 2008, I want to climb Old La Honda (OLH) in 19:10, which is about 4 minutes faster than my current PB (Personal Best) of 23:18.

Why 19:10?

Well, sometimes, when you're browsing around on the web, you find these little nuggets of gold - and I happened to just find this wonderful Climbing Conversion Chart from the first Low Key Hill Climb (LKHC) series that was done back in 1995 - check out this chart near the bottom of this page.

In particular, it will help you predict your times on various climbs in the Bay Area, based on your known time up any of those climbs.

So, let's use, for example, a very well known time up OLH that my friend, Dennis Pedersen did recently - a time of 19:50.

I always thought I wanted to break 20 minutes going up OLH some day for a couple of reasons:

1) It's fun to belong to the sub-anything crowd for a particular climb, and for OLH, under 20 minutes is that "anything" number, at least for me!

2) I figured that if I could break 20 minutes on OLH, then I should be able to break the magic hour mark for climbing Mt Diablo - and if you can get under 60 minutes for the Mt Diablo Challenge, you get this free t-shirt that tells the world you did just that - and that is one of the "Real Big Goals" in my biking life.

Now, Dennis did 19:50 on OLH recently, so what would be his time up various climbs that I do all the time?

So, using the chart, we can convert his OLH time of 19:50 into a Page Mill Rd time - the conversion factor for Page Mill (week 3) is 2.0921, using the chart.

So, 19:50 == 19.833 minutes

And, 19.833 * 2.0921 = 41.5 == 41:30

Thus, his OLH time of 19:50 should translate to a Page Mill time of 41:30. Pretty cool, huh? I think Dennis and I thought his Page Mill time should be close to 42 minutes or so - I had a slightly different algorithm - take the OLH time, add 1 minute, and double it, which would give us a predicted time of 41:40.

Using the same chart, this would mean his Kings Mtn Rd time would be this:

19.833 * 1.2655 = 25.1 == 25:06

Now, his Bike Trip teammate, Mark Edwards, did 21:46 on Kings Mtn Rd in a recent LKHC climb (he got 2nd place, too - check out the results here), so this means Dennis would have finished just a little over 3 minutes behind Mark, and just after Scott Martin on his team, who did 24:55 - so Dennis would have been 26th out of 75 guys that entered that hillclimb contest a little over a week ago. Excellent, Dennis!

And, Dennis' time on Mt Diablo would be very close to the magic 1 hour mark:

19.833 * 3.1290 = 62.1 == 1:02:06

Of course, you can use the chart to figure out what kind of time you need to do on OLH to break an hour for the Mt Diablo climb - the conversion factor for Mt Diablo is 3.1290, so you get this:

60.000 / 3.1290 = 19.175 == 19:10.5

This means, if you can climb OLH in 19:10, you can (theoretically) climb Mt Diablo in just under an hour.

So, is there any evidence to back up these numbers? Well, let's look at Martin Hyland. He did the first LKHC this year, up Montebello Rd (week 1) and did a time of 32:59 (see the full results here).

And, to convert this to an OLH time, the chart says to use 0.5827:

32:59 == 32.9833
32.9833 * 0.5827 = 19.2 == 19:12

And, Martin, it just so happens, did the Mt Diablo Challenge this year - just a week after doing his time of 32:59 on Montebello Rd. And Martin's time?

59:30.8 ( You can see all the results here)

How about that?

So, now you know why I want to climb OLH in 19:10 by the time we get to this time of year (October) in 2008.

Because if I can climb OLH in 19:10, then I can break 60 minutes for the Mt Diablo Challenge in 2008.

And get that free t-shirt.