Hill Climb Pacing

EvilGoodGuy

As part of a stage race, the first stage is a hill climb. I did the hill climb (3km) in 14mins, avg. grade 9%. My pacing wasn't quite accurate, I averaged 171bpm (290watts), LT is 163 (262watts). It felt alittle easy, I finished the time trial then did 3 more repeats of half the hill at LT. I'd like to finish with nothing left. I plan to do it again next week. What is 15min wattage as a % of FTP? I think this will give me a starting point rather than doing the time trial multiple times. I would like to get it right next week.

peterpen

Depends on the individual. Mine is about 115%, from non-TT race data.

You could look at a MMP vs. duration chart and go from there - unless you've done a similar all-out 15m effort, you probably could use 15m MMP as a starting point, then ramp up for the final 3 - 5m.

NomadVW

This will depend a lot on the hill and the rider. My 15 min MMP avg power is 107% FTP on a 28 min climb.

Normalized is 116% because there's a sizeable descent portion at around 7 minutes into the climb for about 1 minute.

Best way to know what you should do is to train the course or something as close as possible.

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Cycling Blog - Training with Power

peterpen

I wonder what your 15m MMP AP is for a 15m hill?

Interestingly enough, when I look at a MMP chart for all this season's data, the difference between 15m and 60m is the virtually the same whether the chart is set for NP or AP - 116.6% vs. 115.3%. I find this somewhat surprising, given the fact that both MMP are probably taken from non-steady state efforts.

EvilGoodGuy

I think I'll try 300watts this time. The first half of the climb is significantly steeper (12%) than the second half of the climb (6%ish). Is it better to use a consisent pace or vary it according to terrain?

sd_joe

This article indicates that power should vary with grade:

http://www.biketechreview.com/power/supercomputers.htm

It makes intuitive sense since using power to overcome "extra" aero drag (which varies with speed squared) is less effective than using it to fight gravity (which has no dependency on speed).