Originally Posted by
bocobiking
Wouldn't you want to keep from “maxing out too early” no matter if you’re a racer or not? I’m not a racer, but Voigt's technique works really well for me. It keeps me from blowing up on long climbs.
My thinking is that in racing, you're generally trying to save enough for a sprint to the finish, on a regular ride, you're just trying to save enough to finish. I find that climbs vary so much depending on all kinds of factors that a general rule of how to do it doesn't work all that well for me. I do think I tend to do better with a steady pace rather than the building one you're describing. I did have a really frustrating one last weekend where what I thought was a short hill turned out to be just the first in a series of a few miles of "staircase" hills. Each one was topped with a plateau just long enough so you didn't see the next hill until you were about to crest the previous one. I completely paced myself wrong on the first three hills, thinking each time I was done climbing.