King's Mountain

"Without a picture, it didn't happen." My faithful Bianchi Volpe at the top of the King's Mountain climb.

Last post, which was about my plan for my second six weeks of training, I said "If I get comfortable going up Old La Honda Road, then what?" but then concluded with "I am trying to ignore such questions for now". As it happens, I was unable to ignore that question; it is something my son and I ended up talking about. King's Mountain and Old La Honda Road are nearby roads over the same mountain range and he has ridden both. He concluded "King's Mountain is about 30% harder than Old La Honda. Let me know when you are ready to try that." Ready or not, here I come. In just my second week of including Old La Honda as part of my weekly workout, my son and I got to the base of that climb only to find it closed for road repairs. What to do? With an impish grin on his face, he casually mentioned "Well, we could try King's Mountain..." What kind of cyclist would I be if I ignored a challenge like that, even considering the bonus miles we rode by going out of our way to the base of Old La Honda? So ride it we did, and a delightful ride it was.

I have merged the Old La Honda and Kings Mountain rides onto a single map. Because they are so close to each other, much of their routes are in common. The common part of the ride is shown in yellow, the part of the ride unique to the Old La Honda route is in blue/purple and the part of the ride unique to the Kings Mountain route is in red. For the Kings Mountain route, the best ride is to ascend and descend on the same road. In contrast, although Old La Honda Road is a great ascent, it is not a good descent so that ride is a loop, up Old La Honda, down Highway 84.

The map above compares the Old La Honda ride (in purple, which we could not do) to the King's Mountain ride (in red, which we did instead.) This diagram does not show the ride we actually did, which included an extra and unnecessary extension to the base of the Old La Honda climb, it shows the King's Mountain ride as we would have done it were that the intention from the beginning.

It is not obvious from the map why the King's Mountain climb is an "upgrade" from the Old La Honda climb, but it is. The Old La Honda climb is 3.7 miles long and ascends 1420 feet from the base of the climb to the top. (The summit is at 1587 feet.) The King's Mountain climb is 4 miles long and ascends 1634 feet (with a summit at 1860 feet.) Because it is closer to where we start our rides, the total ride up King's Mountain is shorter, 18 miles for King's Mountain vs 23 miles for Old La Honda, but that has a relatively minor impact on the difficulty of the ride. (Because we rode the bonus miles, our ride was 24 miles.) Granting that it is an upgrade, objectively, it would seem like a small one, and that was my subjective opinion as well.

Overall, the ride was lovely. If anything, the scenery of King's Mountain is even better than that of Old La Honda, already one of the prettiest rides I know. Maybe it was just the day or my mood, but the forest through which we climbed seemed a little nicer, but more importantly, the King's Mountain climb includes views out over San Francisco Bay that Old La Honda doesn't. It is hard to accurately compare the difficulty of the rides. The week before, I had underestimated the difficulty of the climb and did not pace myself properly and think that was a big part of why I found that ride so draining. My goal for this week was to work on pacing, to complete the climb in as much comfort as possible, and I maintained that goal when we switched from the Old La Honda to the King's Mountain climb. I think that made a big difference. Make no mistake, it was still a very difficult ride. By the end, my legs were in a fair amount of pain, I had to go very slowly on the ride home, and my legs remained sore for days afterwards. That said, I did not experience the overall exhaustion of the week before, and this week's ride seemed more like a challenging training ride and less like a death march. In summary, I feel like the King's Mountain and Old La Honda climbs are sufficiently similar that I could freely interchange them in my training regimen, that how hard I push will have more impact on how tired I get than the difference in the climbs.

Total climbing for the day was 2808 feet for the King's Mountain ride (including the climbing included in the bonus miles) as compared to 2420 feet for the Old La Honda ride the week before. This is getting into the ballpark of the 4200 feet of climbing included in a 112K/70 mile populaire ride with the San Francisco Randonneurs bicycle club. The various training programs I have considered suggest that the longest training ride to prepare for a long, challenge ride is between ⅔ and ¾ the length of the challenge. Thus, to prepare for a Century ride (100 miles), the longest training ride should be between 67 and 75 miles. Using a value of 70%, my longest training ride to prepare for that 112K populaire should be 49 miles. But what about climbing? Interestingly, none of my training books talks quantitatively about how to prepare for the climbing of a Century ride. I think it is reasonable to say that ideally, the training rides used to prepare for a Century ride should be through the same kind of terrain as that century, so if the mileage of the longest training ride is 70% of the ride, then the climbing should be about 70% as well. That means my 49 mile training ride for the 112K populaire should include about 2940 feet of climbing, not much more than the 2808 feet I did during my first ride up King's Mountain. If I simply added more miles to that ride without adding any major climbs, I should easily meet that goal. I am starting to think that a populaire might not be beyond my abilities. Stay tuned.