rsbob 

Stay seated. If pedaling becomes hard or difficult, shift to a lower gear and increase your cadence. Standing wastes energy. I would recommend it only when sprinting to the finish, or if the gradient is so steep, you might stop or fall over.

More experienced people can probably make a better assessment.

CrowSeph

TNX. I read somewhere that the recommend cadence is near 80 rpm during climbing. Should I go lower with higher gear or higher with lower gear?
(In this case I call high gear the small one)

rsbob 

Using your terms, you want to go higher with a lower gear (in other words the big gears - most teeth - on your rear cassette.). If you have two chain rings in front, you want the smaller (least teeth) ring.

CrowSeph

Yeah but in those events I never use anything less than 52t on the front.

PeteHski

If you are climbing with a 52T chainring then either it isn’t much of a climb or your cadence is going to be very low.

There isn’t much detail in those graphs you posted, but your cadence on the last part of the climb looks to be in the 70s, which is not that bad. If you had lower gears available I would use them to get the cadence up to 80 or higher. But there’s a lot of personal preference here depending on your pedalling style.

When climbs get really steep >10% then cadence tends to be limited by your power and gearing. It then becomes more a case of what cadence you can actually maintain in your lowest gear. Below 60 rpm it becomes a real grind. But on shallower gradients I always try to maintain my cadence around 75-80 on a long steady climb or 90+ if I’m at full gas.

Edit: Also the marker point C on your first graph is before the last and steepest part of the climb. So I’m a bit confused.

CrowSeph

On that climb we decided to go slowly. But the intense section was the part I mentioned before A,B,C.

RChung

If you have gears, cadence isn't that important. However, it's often useful to pay attention to who makes specific cadence recommendations: it's useful because it's a shortcut to knowing who to ignore.

rsbob 

You just identified your problem.

CrowSeph

Yeah but I can keep my ideal speed whiteout it.
When I must know when to change it?

CrowSeph

Here from today ride. Looking for a feedback
​​​​​​The climb on the square is 5km long at 3% And 123 elev gain. Today o did it at 28.1 my best time is 29.5 (probably with a bit of wind too).
Focused on rpm and hr, trying to keep 80rpm and hr near the max. Highest hr at 178

PeteHski

It looks fine for those relatively low grade climbs. Most people intuitively know when to change down. Basically when pedalling becomes too laboured for your liking. As a rough guide I’m usually dropping into the small chainring with slopes >5% unless they are very short.

A relatively short 3% climb would be a big chainring climb for most strong riders. But there’s a lot of overlap between chainrings so I tend to favour the small chainring in a higher rear gear in case there are steeper sections where I may need a lower gear. I try to avoid front shifting in the middle of a climb. But if I know the climb well then I would probably just stay in the big ring if there are no steep ramps.

CrowSeph

Race day.
My rank was 8/31 with 27.6 kmh, also won the second place for the regional championship. The other guy who won the first place of the regional championship overtaken me for just 6 seconds. But I'm happy anyways because is from my same team, also he doing only hill climb Chrono.... So it's well deserved.

also my hr was not working properly....
probably I gone full gas on most parts, I also got a Strava KOM on the flat section 😂😂 but on the most steep parts I lost a lot of seconds... On the last part my teammate had more than 10seconds over me.

Good experience and satisfaction too. Tnx all for the advices.

​​​​​

merlinextraligh

Wrong answer. You lose more time in the hard parts than you gain in the easy parts. So you want to go a bit above your sustainable power when it’s steep, and recover on the flat parts.

Without seeing the profile, it’s hard to be specific, but in general you’ll be faster going over threshold on the steep parts, and recovering a bit below threshold on the less steep or flat parts.

the math works out that backing off just a bit on the easier parts costs you much less time than you gain by
pushing the hard parts. Think 105% on the toughest parts, 95% to recover on the easier parts.

PeteHski

Good effort! Sounds like you went a bit too hard on the flat section and paid the price on the steeps. But it’s not easy to make the optimum compromise without a power meter and a specific plan.

CrowSeph

yea... definitely i payed the malfunctioning of the hear rate...
with less than 10seconds i can obtain the 5ft place..

GhostRider62

This TT would take a fat old bastard like me around 20 minutes, it is definitely big ring the whole way.

I would use my best aero kit and bike staying seated and at threshold except on the "steep" 6.3%" pitch where I would be well over threshold for me say going from 300 watts to 400-450 watts on the steep bit trying to maintain momentum (speed). Without the course profile, it is impossible to be more specific other than you should want to be dead as you cross the line