Originally Posted by
terrymorse
Climbing does call for higher muscle forces, particularly in the quads, glutes, and lower back. If those muscles aren't adapted to the additional force required, they can fatigue quickly. So your gym time should incorporate exercises that target glutes, quads, and lower back. My leg/back day works all of those muscle groups, plus hamstrings and calves. My go-to quads/glutes exercise is the chair plié.
I agree with this, but feel that the muscular training/gym work is most useful if you will be climbing some very steep grades. I did substantial gym work (of the sort Terry Morse is describing) for some races that involved some relatively short but extremely steep (up to 37%) grades that required some brute force. But even for shallower but longer climbs (such as the OP described), those exercises certainly won't hurt, and may help stave off fatigue or (worst-case scenario) cramps.
By the way,
Cramic : the posters who are pissing on one another haven't offered any reason to believe that they know anything about this. I'll just offer that, for some years, I was in your situation: living on the flatlands, and occasionally traveling to Colorado to do some of the biggest climbing events in the country. Like
this and
this. The advice that I gave in an earlier post, copied below, worked for me. Sure, training on hills is better, but not essential. Even when I later lived (and raced) in a hillier area, I only rode big hill workouts 1x per week, at the most. As for the "psychological" benefit of training on actual hills...Again, not really important. And again, my advice comes from actual experience.
Originally Posted by
Koyote
Including some actual hill training would be useful, but is not essential. Any training that builds aerobic capacity will help for your event. You can incorporate interval training into your commute rides — work up to longer intervals over a period of a few weeks. By “longer” I mean 10 mins or even 20 mins.