on or out of saddle when hitting hills on a 10 mile TT?

Tino4444

Hi All,

On my weekly 10 mile TT there is a stretch of road that is about half a mile to a mile in length that is all hill. The hill is no more than about 1:8 but its in the last few miles of the TT.

Now I normally tackle this hill seated and end up crawling up the hill at about 13mph. My question is would I be better getting off my seat and climbing the hill with a bigger gear or just keep practicing in my seat and hope I get faster?

My time last week was 29 mins and I keep analysing the route looking at what areas I need to improve on, and this is the main part.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Tino.

dennisn

I would say that since it's near the end, get UP and go for it. Try to catch a glimpse of your speedo to see if it helps. You should be able to hang in there for the last mile or two
even if you give it a really hard stand up effort. Hopefully you'll be going a bit faster than usual when you crest the hill and will get back up to finishing speed a little quicker. Then again you could die after hitting the top. Just kidding. Good luck.

SBezza

If you are going as slow as 13mph, getting out of the saddle would be OK, as the aerodynamic advantage of staying seated is not really there at that sort of speed. Things is, I doubt you could power at speed out of the saddle for a mile, so you would probably need a combination of both

I would work on trying to keep a pretty good tempo speed up the hill, and perhaps training for this by doing hill repeats will see good benefits.

GeorgeShaw

SBezza wrote:

If you are going as slow as 13mph, getting out of the saddle would be OK, as the aerodynamic advantage of staying seated is not really there at that sort of speed. Things is, I doubt you could power at speed out of the saddle for a mile, so you would probably need a combination of both

I would work on trying to keep a pretty good tempo speed up the hill, and perhaps training for this by doing hill repeats will see good benefits.

+1. I'm a relative newbie, so take this at face value, but I would have thought that the main issue you would have is momentum. You could think about hitting the base of the hill getting out of the saddle, to keep your momentum up, sit through the middle part of the hill and try to keep the tempo up, and then get out of the saddle again towards the top to keep your momentum going as you start to suffer. But the best thing is probably to try different strategies and see which one works for you.

Tino4444

Thanks for all of your advice.

I think I will get up at the start of the hill and see how I get on. I may obviously need to sit down at some point to get breath back etc.

I can keep to a good pace when on flat and down hill but its the up hills that I must beat if I am to improve my time.

I will let you know how I get on.

Thanks again.

Tino