I am planning to ride the Mt. Charleston Hill Climb TT as a fitness benchmark. The race is Sat, 9/17. Here is the race flyer http://www.mountcharlestonhillclimb.com/eventinfo.html. This is a straight, 17.5 mile, 5.7% avg grade climb (see profile below). I haven't yet ridden the course, but my weekly hill climb repeats are done on a 3.3 mile hill with approximately the same average grade. I will ride the hill twice this week and twice next week to get a feel for pacing, but my pacing strategy thinking at this point is to try to maintain a relatively constant average speed. This will probably result in a pretty large power swing of as much as 300w. My training strategy between now and the race is to climb the route 4 times, plus 2 other "hard" 3-hour rides (with a 5-mile climb and a bunch of rolling stuff), 4 recovery rides and a 1-hr easy spinning ride the day before. I'm very comfortable climbing and the only thing unusual is the length of the climb. So, I'm a little nervous about getting into a deficit at the mid-point because there just aren't many places to recover without losing a lot of bike speed. Any suggestions for training or pacing strategy?