The LKHC Converter - first release now available

Most of you that read this blog regularly (yeah - both of us) know about a great hill climbing series that is quite, uh, low key - the Low Key Hill Climb series (LKHC) - you can read all about this year's festivities right here.

I wanted to participate in the series this year, but we all know what a disaster it's been for me the last few months - I totally lost the (little) climbing ability I had so carefully gained in the first half of the year, as I delved back into the exciting world of bike racing for the first time in 30 years, starting back in about July of this year.

But a number of my friends did the LKHC series this year - and I always followed the action, anxiously waiting to see the results published later that day or the next (each climb was done on a Saturday, except for the last one, which is traditionally done on Thanksgiving morning and goes up Mt Hamilton).

I sent out some e-mails to some biking buddies of mine, to let them know about a great set of conversion charts that one of the organizers of the LKHC series, Dan Connelly, had put together for the 1995 and 1996 editions of the series. The LKHC series was abandoned for about 10 years, but was resurrected in 2006, and was so popular, they did it again this year - and gained even *more* converts! I suspect it will be even bigger in 2008.

The 1995 conversion chart and the 1996 conversion chart provided you with these cool conversion factors, so that if you knew your time up one of the climbs, you could use the conversion factors for that climb to calculate (or, predict) your expected times for all the other climbs.

I've used those conversion charts a lot in the last few months - in fact, a previous blog entry I wrote explained Why I Want To Climb OLH in 19:10. But I always calculated my predicted times the old-fashioned way, with a calculator, of course... :)

But one of my cycling buddies, Rich Seiter, sent me an Excel spreadsheet that allowed you to enter in your climbing time for one of the climbs, and then it would automatically calculate all your predicted times for the other climbs done that year - how cool! I made a few minor tweaks of his Excel spreadsheet and sent it out to all the rest of my biking buddies, with Rich's blessings, of course (thanks, Rich!).

But then I got to thinking - wouldn't it be cool to have an online version of that same concept? And hence, the LKHC Converter project was born - and now you can see the results for yourself:

The LKHC Converter

After I put out the first version of this web page, I let Dan Connelly know about it, and encouraged him to create similar conversion charts for the 2006 LKHC and 2007 LKHC series - and he said he'd do just that. He also asked me to let the LKHC e-mail list know about it - and so I did.

Naturally, I got all kinds of feedback - and as different ideas and requests came in, it got fancier and fancier - with more features and more goodies. The current version you see now represents about the 10th iteration of that web page!

So have some fun and play around with it - and drop me a note if you have any comments/suggestions to make - I'd love to hear your ideas.

And when Dan gets me those new conversion charts for 2006 and 2007, I'll be sure to update the LKHC Converter, of course.

I'm also working on creating a version of that same web page for our local cycling group - it would have a lot of the other climbs that many of us do in the local Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz area - but I won't have as many data points to use to create the tables that drive it, so it will mostly be useful to just a few of us, I suspect.

But who knows? Maybe this will be the start of a whole new career... :)