I moved recently and my new favorite hill is 1.5 miles long at about 5% the whole way. The grade is very consistent and it takes me about 9-10 minutes to get up the hill depending on how hard I’m pushing (the 9 minutes was an all out pr, 10 is something I can do in the threshold or sweet spot zone). I am not really training at the moment, but I’d like to start incorporating some intervals into my riding again. I’m thinking this length of hill is probably best for threshold or sweet spot intervals but too long for me for VO2 max intervals (there’s no good spot to turn around until the top). I’ll be able to ride the hill once per week with my other two cycling days being my bike commute to work (~22 miles round trip, almost completely flat).
So my question with all that is, does it sound like I’m on the right track using the hill for threshold or sweet spot intervals? And perhaps I progress by adding intervals as I get fitter again?
10m is basically the shortest ftp interval I would ever do. Sweet spot would be longer. You can use it for 10m reps but I would want to know how you are going to progress the workout.
Could you ride a heavier bike so that it takes longer? Either another bike that weighs more, or put ballast on your current bike. A pannier rack with a 20kg plate will slow you down plenty.
Yep. Trying to do structured workouts in suburbia is a pain with the ups/downs, stops, traffic lights, traffic… It’s great if you have a nearby long uninterrupted grade. Living south of Denver, I have some good ones nearby. A popular one is Deer Creek Canyon, which is 13 miles and a 2900’ climb to the top, which is ~8,500’ in elevation. The grade varies but is always up with no lights or stop signs and relatively little traffic. That’s where I’d usually do outdoor workouts…when I was doing them.
Could you start riding threshold on the flat, before getting to the hill? That’d make intervals longer.
And even if it’s hard to turn round on the hill, you don’t need to ride all of it at the same intensity. You could do something like 30-30s by speeding up and slowing down / use gears repeatedly until the top. Or do vo2max until halfway, or start at halfway (or whatever length interval you want).
If you ride the hill repeatedly, you’ll also get a good feeling for how long it takes to get to where on the hill, so you can look at markers instead of the time on your computer. For example, a vo2max interval is “from the fence to the large tree”, etc. I find that much easier than looking at the time.
Lots of good ideas here, thank you all! When I was doing structured training with TR, most of my threshold intervals were under or around the ten minute mark, which is why I was thinking of that for this hill. I do recall that towards the end of my time I was doing some longer ones and this hill wouldn’t work for that.
I like the idea of doing shorter VO2 max intervals up this hill. I do think I have sufficient gearing to make the recoveries easy enough for this to work, especially since the grade is a pretty consistent 5%. Edit: There really is no safe way to turn around part way up the hill – it is a four lane divided road. That probably makes it sound awful to most of you, but there’s a double bike lane and its very pretty so that balances out the downsides.
This. Or you could do 30/30s or 40/20s repeating up. If it’s 10min threshold, that’s a nice long set of short repetitive stuff. You could even do 3-4minx2 with a min or two of soft pedaling inbetween as a set, then roll down and repeat for another set
Could you do 4 mins VO2, 2 mins recovery, 4 mins VO2 to top of hill? Adjust as necessary to fit time it takes. Then longer recover as you go back down, then repeat.