A bucket list item for me is ro ride the west side of Trail Ridge Road, in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, from the Grand Lake Entrance to the summit. I found the Strava segment, but I would like to try to simulate the climb as best possible in TR. I have no particular PR or goal time, I just want to complete it.
Can anyone give me tips to consider, a how-to, or have a workout that they created just like this that they could share.
For what it’s worth, I’m 225 lbs (102 kilos) with an FTP of 299.
Thanks in advance!!
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TR is not the best tool for that job. If you have a Garmin or Wahoo head unit, these are handy and easier to use.
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Ahh, guess I should have mentioned that. I have a Garmin. I’ll check this out, thanks Chad.
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Is it on fulgaz??
I agree with Chad - importing the segment into your Garmin is probably the best way to have your trainer simulate the climb.
I looked on Strava, and if it is the segment I think it is, it is a long climb with a pretty consistent gradient. In terms of training for it on TR, I would recommend Sweet Spot Base, Sustained Power Build, and Century.
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https://www.strava.com/segments/1978567
This one?
I’d approach it differently. I’m going to say an aggressive upper tempo effort would take you about 2-3 hours to complete that climb. Possibly more due to elevation, depending on where you live and train. From my perspective, that implies you want to progress to doing at least 90 minutes sweet spot during training.
But lets go back to your question of simulating the actual climb. A quick search of the TR library for SS workouts, and sorting by TSS, you have some pretty long workouts that would match the length of that climb:
But for training, I’d simply focus on doing longer and longer sweet spot workouts. One a week. Progress it out to 90 minutes. I did that to support a day with 5 climbs totaling 15,000+ feet
and that was about 8 hours of total climbing at 93kg and roughly 270-280W FTP (guess).
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Rouvy has one with video, but I think it’s going the opposite way of what you’re after. There are some others without video that might have at least one that fits the bill. I just searched “trail ridge” so there could be some others hiding with different names too. You can also create the route and upload it to ride it following the map, AFAIK.
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An alternative ride on the other side of the park is to ride up the Old Fall River Road to the summit. This is a gravel road and gets way less traffic than the paved roads on either side of the park.
It’s a lot safer as a result (the paved roads are pretty narrow, with not a lot of shoulder space, and there can be an almost constant stream of traffic driving by).
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I did this as well for a ride I was driving to and couldn’t preview. i was able to then import into the workout creator. IIRC I believe the screen also would flash up the gradient as workout text, which was pretty cool. It has been a long while since I did this, but it was pretty darn useful.
I’m not gonna train for it specifically, just want to be able to simulate the time/suffering it will require. I normally follow the 40k TT training progression.
I know, I was there last fall, saw a few riders. Drivers didn’t seem particularily dangerous, but one distracted driver is all it takes. A very real possibility of course, as the views are incredible.
I believe there is a short period of time where the open up the road to cyclists only. I have to look into that.
Thank for the tip! These look good.
That ride of yours looks brutal!
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On my 520 I was able to control my trainer using ANT+ FE-C. Please note the route from any online source (Strava, GC, Ride w/GPS, etc) or directly from you head unit would be very choppy. I used a route in my history and it was unridable. I would “clean it up” the GPX using GpsPrune (plan), Stepwise (vertical) and Vue GPX Smoother (vertical). I use GpsPrune to smooth out my path, reduce the number of points, and fix bridge crossings. Next I would use Stepwise to remove fix vertical jumps and tight turns (probably not need to Garmin head unit). I use Vue GPX Smoother as final smoothing.