Power on long climbs on race day
Greetings, I'm racing Challenge Penticton this year and it has two long climbs of 6.6 miles (1100 feet of gain) and 10.5 (1050 feet of gain). The race execution says to use third gear for climbs over 3 minutes, but these climbs are significantly longer than 3 minutes. I'm inclined to stay in 2nd gear during these climbs but I'd like to get some other opinions. I did go out and do some long climbing today and stayed in 2nd gear for practice. It worked out well but I could feel it in my quads at the end of the day. It seems to me that going up into third gear would be counter productive for the run.
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Comments
Yes, 2nd gear. More importantly, the question of "how hard should I ride _this_ hill?" Should always be answered from the perspective of "I need to finish this ride and then ride a marathon."
In the end, there's the watts you plan to ride and then the watts you actually do ride, which are often less due to "this is good enough / HR seems a little high here / I want to save on this so I can pay later, etc" conversations that happen in real time.