Montebello is a sweet little climb near my house that has a
couple of steep pitches, it’s a favorite.
I use it pretty regularly for what I call 3-peats, 3 times to the school
(2 miles up), usually in the 13-15
minute range. Today I didn’t want to
‘hit out’ super hard…hoping to keep good form away a bit longer before my annual implosion, so I decided
to do a little experiment. My current
FTP is set at 320W, so I thought I’d see the difference in pacing a 320W effort
on three trials. First I did the climb at 320W aveage. Then I did it again at a
320W average, but did the first 5 minutes at 10% over (352W) and gradually lost
average power the rest of the climb as close to 1 watt at a time as I could.
Finally, I tackled the climb at 10% under FTP (288W) for the first five minutes and
then tried to raise my average back to FTP over the remainder of the climb in 1
watt increments. Scientific? No, not really…but let’s see what we got anyway:
|
320W Steady
|
320W First 5m 110%
|
320W First 5m 90%
|
Time
|
15:36
|
15:44
|
15:28
|
Average Watts
|
320
|
321
|
321
|
Normalized Watts
|
323
|
323
|
324
|
Kilojoules
|
300
|
303
|
298
|
TSS (Intensity Factor)
|
26.4 (1.008)
|
26.7 (1.008)
|
26.4 (1.00)
|
VI
|
1.01
|
1
|
1.01
|
Very interesting…the fastest was the 5m @ 290W start, but
let’s see what else stands out...
Here are the three efforts laid out together:
yellow @
320W, red @ 320W+10% and green @320W-10%:
Recall that green was a steady push from 5:00 on and you can
see the slight uptick in power (top graph) and cadence (lower graph). I like to
look for landmarks in the files as time stamp reference points. For example in
the first 5:00 the file shows a noticeable jump in cadence at around 3:00
– 4:00…this is where the course flattens
out for a bit and you can see that the second effort (+10%) moved to both a
higher cadence overall and a bit earlier than the other two. In contrast the
third effort (-10%) had a much lower cadence in those first few minutes (closer
to 40RPM) as I had to try and keep average watts down, so the stair step of
cadence comes nearly a minute later, and the power remains well below the other
two at all points.
Moving a bit farther up there is a final ramp that shows up
nicely. On the first run it is about
1:30 @ 350W and 71rpm:
On the2nd run it is closer to 1:39 @ 302W and 65rpm as I
tried to keep the average at 320W for the whole interval.
On the 3rd pass I am still chasing the 320W
average a little bit (started the final climb at ~317W), but had to be careful
to not go too hard. In the end that got me to the top in 1:22 @ 359W and 72rpm,
very similar to the first pass, so why the 9s second difference in time? Entry
speed.
You can see the differences in speed over the last 6:00 of
the climb in the graph below. It’s pretty easy to reference landmarks on each
and you can see that the final pass was faster in almost every area over the
final minutes as I was both chasing the targeted 320W average and covering more
ground. The first landmark is the obvious bump in speed around 6:00. The red
represents the +10% pace, so I arrived at this ‘flat’ section about 20 seconds
faster than the first pass and about 35s faster than the final run. By the
second speed surge at around 9:00 the gap is down to about 5-8 seconds over the
first pass, but still hovers near 35 seconds to the final run. Finally by the
third speed surge, about 11:30 in, the final effort is starting to close the
gap, down to about 15 seconds. Note that the final 0.22 miles were done at 9.2
mph (1st pass), 8.2 mph on the second and 10mph for the third pass.
In the five seconds before the final surge I averaged 19.7 on the third
interval, but only 18.5 on the second, and a modest 17.3 mph on the first. This
section is flat to slightly downhill, offering a small respite before the final
surge if needed, or a chance to make up some time if you can.
For comparison let’s look at my fastest time up Montebello,
a 13:01 effort that averaged 357W (I was about 7 pounds lighter too!). The five seconds before the final surge only
averaged 16.4mph, but the final surge was done in 1:04 at 473Wavg. The full
climb is demonstrably more impressive all around when looked at side by side
with these three...
Power:
Speed:
Guess
I need to lose some weight and ride harder!
UPDATE: A friend asked a couple of good questions about the climb itself and my efforts relative to the grade, so here is some additional information on the climb - the full climb is just over five miles (5.3) and averages 'only' 6.9%
But I only went to the school:
Info and the gradient graphs from a really great site:
Here is the raw data:
Raw Data:
Dist Grade Alti. Location
---- ----- ------ --------
0.00 15% 550 start - Stevens Canyon Road
0.01 12% 555
0.04 10% 570
0.07 10% 580
0.10 11% 600
0.14 4% 620 Brookside Stables - left turn
0.16 9% 630
0.18 10% 640
0.22 12% 660
0.25 10% 680
0.28 12% 690
0.30 12% 700
0.33 10% 720
0.35 7% 730
0.38 6% 740
0.41 8% 750
0.44 8.5% 760
0.46 4.5% 770
0.50 6% 780
0.52 6% 790
0.54 8% 795
0.57 8.5% 810
0.59 9% 820
0.63 13% 840
0.66 11% 855
0.69 8.5% 870
0.71 12% 880
0.72 12% 890 Peacock Court
0.75 12% 905
0.77 10% 920
0.80 5% 930
0.84 5.5% 935
0.86 9% 940
0.90 9% 970
0.93 6% 980
0.96 10% 990
0.99 13% 1010
1.02 14% 1030
1.05 14% 1050
1.07 16% 1060
1.08 12% 1070
1.10 8% 1080
1.12 6% 1090
1.15 5.5% 1100
1.18 8% 1110
1.20 11.5% 1120
1.23 9.5% 1130
1.27 8% 1150
1.35 7% 1180
1.38 8% 1190
1.41 10% 1200
1.44 11% 1220
1.47 8% 1240
1.49 4% 1240
1.52 11% 1250
1.56 11.5% 1270
1.60 10% 1295 View
1.65 10% 1310
1.68 8% 1335
1.73 9% 1350
1.75 7% 1360 Pichotti home
1.78 1% 1370
1.81 -2.5% 1370
1.83 0% 1370
1.85 8% 1380
1.87 12.5% 1390
1.89 9% 1400
1.92 9.5% 1410
1.94 8% 1425
1.97 6% 1430
1.99 8% 1440
2.03 10% 1455
2.05 8% 1465
2.07 1% 1470 Montebello School
