Sportive height climbed comparison

galatzo
galatzo Posts: 1,295
Hi

I've just done the Tour Ride which according to their info included a total climbed height of 2006m on a 145km/90mile route.

According to the Dragon Ride website their 130km/81mile route has 2300m of climbing.

I would have thought the Dragon Ride, given it's name and reputation, to be much harder than the Tour Ride but the stats don't seem to back this up or am I wrong ?

Also are these low normal or high amounts of climbing over this kind of distance ?

Which others Sportives offer a similar level climbing ?

Cheers
25th August 2013 12hrs 37mins 52.3 seconds 238km 5500mtrs FYRM Never again.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    Anonymous Posts: 79,667
    It depends on how those climbs come.

    I would rather ride long steady climbs than british style steep, short, rolling terrain...
  • galatzo
    galatzo Posts: 1,295
    Me too. It's that British industrial revolution metality were we build a road straight up it rather than a bit of extra tarmac and wind our way up gradually like they do on the continent.
    25th August 2013 12hrs 37mins 52.3 seconds 238km 5500mtrs FYRM Never again.
  • Just done the Cumberland Challenge, that comes in at 105 miles and 2900 metres of climbing. That included quite a few straight up and overs.
  • None of my measurement devices had the CC at anything like 2,900m though. Garmin 705 had 2,600m (and that tends to over-egg it, even though it's got a barometric altimeter), the program I use to record stuff (Rubitrack) had 1900m (that has a smoothing algorithm in, which I think under-does it a bit on very undulating days) and mapmyride had 1300m!

    Did Pendle Pedal in August, same distance as CC and by comparison my Garmin had 3,700m for that, Rubitrack had 2,700m and mapmyride had 2000m.

    Not sure what that means in terms of what to expect though. Pendle felt very, very lumpy, but not much harder than CC as the hills tended to be fewer, and bigger.
  • Andy_from_embsay: Was your Garmin playing OK on Sunday. About 2 miles from Brampton (at the end of the first loop) my 705 just turned it self off and when it did come back on I had an amazing average speed of 300 mph!!! Once I had shut it down properly and restarted it, it seemed OK and recorded the second loop with no problems.

    Anyway, back to the topic! Despite the slight technical problems my Garmin showed in total about 8500ft which is very close to what Andy's 705 measured. Although the 705 can over-egg the total ascent, when you use the device to look at your current altitude it does appear to be pretty accurate. I found the CC a tough ride, much harder than the Cyclone, which apparently had less climbing!

    I do think that sometimes the organisers of sportives look for the steepest climbs around and take you over them. I for one, like others in this thread, much prefer the long stead climbs like Hartside or Cat and Fiddle. My mate on the other hand really likes to stomp up those short, sharp climbs! Different strokes for different folks I guess...

    The Cheshire Cat sportive has about 2300m of climbing but again the hills were pretty steep! All good fun though... :D
  • Garmin was ok, but it does seem to have developed a rather irritating habit of trying to get me to do a u-turn - and just beeping continously until I stop and turn navigation off. Not sure whether it's something to do with roadtrip which I use to upload routes, or it's the routing algorithms but it happened just after we turned north after climbing through Banks and just beeped for about 10 minutes!
  • So I didn't climb anywhere near 2900 metres on Sunday then? :(

    Certainly felt like more :oops:
  • LardLover wrote:
    So I didn't climb anywhere near 2900 metres on Sunday then? :(

    Certainly felt like more :oops:

    300m short! But I agree it felt like I was always climbing with very little downhill to enjoy and recover- apart from the descent of Hartside which was fantastic...