When we did our city tour two weekends ago, one of the highlights was Mt. Bonnell. I’d never climbed it before, and I was looking forward to it, for some reason. I guess I had an unrealistic idea of my climbing ability.
Going through neighborhoods on the way there, we came upon a short, steep hill on a residential street. I downhifted to a low gear, but was up out of the saddle, standing on the pedals, struggling to mash the pedals down and keep the wheels turning. I could have gone down two more gears, but because the bike was straining already, I figured I’d lose all my momentum if I tried a downshift, so I kept grinding away. The bottom bracket made a creaky noise I’d never heard before. As long as I could make the bike protest, I thought, I had enough left in me to get up the hill.
And I did. Man, that was a tough one, and with car traffic coming from behind, I had no choice but to go straight up the road — no chance to zig-zag up the hill.
On Mt. Bonnell itself, we had a challenging grade to a right-hand bend, and then the grade steepened. I pulled into a driveway, did a loop, then shot back onto the street with some forward momentum. That momentum carried me, oh, maybe 10 yards or so. This time, I shifted down all the way into the granny gear. I was still tired from the earlier hill, but there was no traffic this time, and I used the width of the street to zig-zag my way up. It seemed like it would take forever, but I finally made it to the top.
An experienced biker riding with us guessed the grade was between 16-20 percent. I decided I wouldn’t be in a hurry to tackle it again (you might recall that I made a wrong turn, and we wound up climbing Bonnell again from the other side — but we walked our bikes this time, too pooped).
My conclusion is that I don’t do enough challenging hills as part of my regular rides. I’ve got some routes that include hills, but nothing like Bonnell. So I suppose I was just undertrained for it.
But if I have to mash pedals in the granny gear time after time, I’m not sure I want to get much better at hills.
What do you suggest for a noob to become at least a little more adept at climbing?
She catches a lot of flak about having a kickstand, but she does ride clipless. The tires are 32mm, and she had the bike shop add a higher stem to give her a quite upright position when riding.
Here’s what most of the ride looked like to me: Scott, Dee Dee, and Tom lead the way along lightly-traveled country roads.
What vehicles there were are used to bikers on these roads over the weekend. We’re careful to move to single file along the edge of the road when we detect a car or truck coming up behind us. The animals are equally blase about bikers. This cow has seen it all before, and we didn’t interest her in the least.
