UniChris

Beyond the obvious of "ride faster" what I really want to know, is how do you make it so that you're riding the appropriate speed at any given instant in the climb?

I've got a local climb a few miles from home that's an average of 5.5% for 3/4 of a mile. And somewhat ironically, my fastest ever time was the first time I climbed it.

One reason was simply that I was in my best ever riding condition late in the first pandemic summer - going for rides had been the one part of the world that still worked. But increasingly I'm coming to realize that another part was that I climbed it best when I didn't yet know anything about the hill - I started up as if it were a short climb, and was surprised to discover it just kept going and going, reducing in slope at one point and then increasing after going around a bend.

Ever time I ride it now, I find myself instinctively saving something for that "summit cone" so while my times are improving now that I'm targeting it, they're not back to where they were.

One idea would be to ignore the variations in the climb, figure out the cadence that would shave a few percent off my best time, and train myself to ride that - almost "carry a metronome" if that's what it took.

Another would be to try to figure out some sort of real time heart rating monitoring and be guided by that?

The obvious of course would be to just give it my best in each moment, and if I have to slow down, slow down, or even stop. But the problem is: I can't. I've been up the hill by both bike and unicycle, with times that are thoroughly intermixed because it's still my power output either way - but the unicycle efforts are a lot more fun. And that means that if I stall out, I'm done - unless it's near someone's driveway that intersects the slope I probably can't even get back on but have to walk - and much as I'm making the hill a goal, it's far enough from home that I go there as part of a ride I hope to enjoy, not just to attack it. So while I want to PR the climb, I'm also really opposed to failing the climb - I need a strategy that actually gets me up it, without ever dropping below say 5 mph because I tried to got too fast somewhere else in it.

Is the whole question of strategy just silly? Yeah, probably... if I ride it enough times of course I'm going to go faster.

But part of the fun is thinking about it, in between the actual attempts that can only happen every few days.