Riding steep hills to increase fitness: Road to the Tevis Cup Post #53

Fantazia and I always do a lot of climbing, because that’s the nature of living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. (See my post on the prerequisites for riding the Sierra Nevada). It’s especially hilly where we live: in a mile I can go from our training barn at ~800′ to nearly 1800′. Lately, however, I’ve focused even more on riding steep hills to increase fitness. A few weeks ago, we went up the first really steep hill we attempted last summer, described in my post How to calculate the grade of hills (the first example). It’s about 400′ of climb over half a mile, with an average grade of 14.6%*. Included in that average are about two tenths of a mile with grades ranging from 30% to 40%.

*In my post from last summer, I calculated a grade of 13.15% based on 361′ of elevation gain. With the data from August 29th this year, I calculated 424 feet elevation gain, which would be 15.44% grade. This is a bit crazy-making, so I looked at other days, and decided to call it 400′ elevation gain. It’s definitely half a mile! The apps just disagree on elevation. I used GAIA and Mapymyrun last year. Now I am using Garmin, which is probably more accurate.

In any case, it’s steep. And on August 29th, Fantazia cantered up most of it, with one break to huff and puff. I let her choose her pace (she knows the hill very well) on the premise she’d learn to pace herself better. I was amazed at the pace she chose, and how fast she recovered at the top.

This hill was within a 5 mile ride with a total of 1,400′ elevation gain, in 90 minutes, in the heat (90F).

Above: Looking up the steepest part of hill, after having come up–at a canter–about 1/2 of the way.

The improvement

I first did that hill on July 19, 2020. It took me 54 minutes to get from the barn to the gate near the top of the hill (I turned around, because I was not yet sure I could close the gate behind me). Fantazia walked the entire way up the hill, stopping frequently to catch her breath. It was 2.15 miles the way we went that day.

On August 29th, 2021, it took us 42 minutes to reach that gate, even though we went 2.58 miles (with other hills) and stopped to take a picture (2 minutes).

Specifics of the hill

The first half mile is the easy part, with a grade averaging 12.88%. There is a bit of a break halfway, with about 20 feet with a slight downhill slope, and 20 more of almost flat. Then it goes up at an average grade of 19.24% the rest of the way.

Fantazia did the first half in 2 minutes, 44 seconds. She did the second half in 3 minutes, 30 seconds. I was impressed.

Nine days later, we did the hill again… slower!

It was another 90F degree day, and we had followed the same path to the hill as we did the 29th. Fantazia did the first half faster, in about 2 minutes. She did the second half a bit more slowly, in just under four minutes. Again, impressive. You can see segments of both in the videos below.

The first half:

The second half: