Hi-
So here's my deal. I live and train in the bay area and I can't seem to find any place to ride on flats so almost all of my training is in hills. My question is, does anyone have any "rule of thumb" type advice on how to convert hill paces/distances to the equivalent on flats?
It seems the benfit of going down hills quickly never makes up for the slowdown of going up. For some emperical evidence, I do certain 50+ mile hilly loops climbing about 2-4k ft with an average pace around 15mph and when I raced the flat Cali 1/2 IM last year I averaged around 20+mph. Does a 30% factor sound right?
Also, it seems hard to do specific workouts (i.e. LT, recovery, VO2, etc...) with hills... any comments?
Thanks!
So here's my deal. I live and train in the bay area and I can't seem to find any place to ride on flats so almost all of my training is in hills. My question is, does anyone have any "rule of thumb" type advice on how to convert hill paces/distances to the equivalent on flats?
It seems the benfit of going down hills quickly never makes up for the slowdown of going up. For some emperical evidence, I do certain 50+ mile hilly loops climbing about 2-4k ft with an average pace around 15mph and when I raced the flat Cali 1/2 IM last year I averaged around 20+mph. Does a 30% factor sound right?
Also, it seems hard to do specific workouts (i.e. LT, recovery, VO2, etc...) with hills... any comments?
Thanks!