Another "Secret" Training Program - Revealed!

For those of you following my blog (which means mostly Dennis Pedersen, of course!), you are aware of a "secret" training program that I started, in order to try and get my climbing legs back - you can read about it right here, in case your forgot about it...

Well, I'm happy to report that the "secret" training program is certainly starting to work - I'm only up to Day 8, which means my next ride up Kings Mtn Rd ("Day 9") will be a distance of 2.2 miles, with an elevation gain of about 800 feet. That ride will be about the half-way point up Kings Mtn Rd, which is a 4.3-mile climb that gains 1590 feet of elevation. My time for that half-way mark should be close to 15 minutes, which means I'll be able to zero in on a sub-30 minute time for that climb, which would be a new PB for me. As I lose a little more weight and gain some new power, I should be able to get that time down to just under 27 minutes by the end of the year, which is my eventual goal - at that point, I calculated I should be able to score 100.0 points on the Low-Key Hillclimb time for Kings Mtn (see the 2007 results for that climb right here). One of my big goals for 2008 is to average 100.0 points on all 9 of the climbs in this year's Low-Key Hillclimb series, which starts on October 1.

So, what is this "other secret" training program, you might be wondering? It's quite simple, really. I decided you just can't go out there and do the same ride up Kings Mtn every day - I actually did 3 days in a row one week, but you need to have some variety. So I had this new idea - I noticed that about this time last year, I was doing a bunch of rides that involved climbing up a variety of short, but steep climbs near where I work here in San Mateo.

In fact, I even scoped out a 42-mile ride that did almost 7000 feet of climbing by hitting 10 of those climbs - most of them are in the 0.5 mile to 1.2 mile range, but will climb 300 feet to 650 feet, meaning they each average something in the 9% to 12% range - pretty steep! I called this monster ride "The 10 Fingers of Death Ride" - you can see a recording of the entire ride right here - that recording was done in my car. But I then broke the ride up into a couple of parts, so I could easily do each half of the ride as one of my "lunch breaks" from work. I then proceeded to do the "Easy 5 Fingers of Death Ride" (check it out here) and the "Hard 5 Fingers of Death Ride" (view it here), since the first 5 climbs are, on average, a little easier than the last 5 climbs.

I noticed that a lot of the PBs I got in the first half of last year seemed to happen not too long after I had done some of those short, steep climbs - so I recently started mixing in some of those climbs into my training program, and noticed that they really seem to be helping me quite a bit. Hence, this is my other "secret" training program - doing regular rides up short, steep climbs. It obviously helps to build up leg strength, which is clearly important for climbing hills faster.

And there you have it...another "secret" training program...revealed!