I believe Sebi did this climb, at least from a post on Instagram, it would appear so.

i'm bringing my gravel bike to the island. i don't know what i'm going to do with it there. i don't have the fitness to ride kaloko. but that doesn't mean i won't try it anyway.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

what is your opinion about the feasibility of moana kea from the visitor center on a gravel bike?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Slowman wrote:

what is your opinion about the feasibility of moana kea from the visitor center on a gravel bike?

You should ask "he who shall not be named" who tried to do it with a road bike. Nigel Gray (one of the local Ontario Pros), a few years back rode from Kailua Kona, up hawaii belt road to saddle road to the Mona Kea access road, all the way up the summit. He rode a cross bike of sorts if I recall.

How much the gravel is "sinky" vs firm depends on when they last grated it. I would think you would be OK on a gravel bike if you have a triple. When I ran up to >11,000 ft with Jonathan Toker, my garmin kept "auto stopping" because I was running so slow I was below my auto stop threshold (it actually went to auto stop a few times on the paved part of the climb to the visitor center).

I think you will need a triple and sufficiently fat and soft tires. If I was to do it on gravel bike this is what I would do:

• drive to saddle road to the base of Mauna Kea visitor center. Ride road wheels to visitor center (I am assuming you have auto support....just get Timothy out to photoshoot you).
• At visitor center, switch to your gravel wheelset
• Ride all the way past the gravel. If your auto support can meet you there, get your road wheels back for the final pavement push to the summit (you will still have around 2000 ft of vertical to go).

Barring the wheel switch, start at higher psi on your gravel tires, go to low psi by letting air out of the gravel and then bring a good hand pump to harden things up a bit for the final pavement section.


Mr. Cementbottle and I have some silly plan to get to the Mauna Kea summit before we are dead. My original plan was ride to visitor center and run the rest. I think that would be easiest. The problem is that I cannot run at the moment, but biking is coming back.


In terms of gearing, Lance said that he was on a 39x27 and totally blew up. This was around the time he was training for the 2010 TdF. I think for most of us we need something like a 34x40 to stay upright and not fall over (especially on the gravel where you would spin out standing).


Please send us your reports. I am hoping to do a mega swim + bike training camp + volunteering during Kona week 2019 or Ultraman week 2019

By the way, I THINK Kaloko on a sufficiently geared gravel bike may be a lot easier than doing it on a 34x28 road machine.

Also if you contemplating the top part of Mauna Kea and you concede you have insufficient fitness for Kaloko, may I suggest that given that top half of Mauna Kea is harder, you just bite the bullet and do both! Throw in Mauna Loa while you are at it, and call it done. I hear since Mauna Loa has been re-paved it is quite the sweet ride. If you rope Paul Thomas into it both of you can race downhill on the new pavement and let it rip like you guys did on Kaloko in 2012 (that was kind of funny watching you try to get revenge on the young guys hammering the descent like you were 19 and Paul Thomas not able to check in the ego and allow the old guy to have victory back down to Kailua Pier)!!!!!

i'm not taking 2 wheelsets. i'm taking a gravel bike, 36mm tires, 34x32. i can certainly get up kaloko. just, not with any grace. i'd rather do something interesting. i don't mind altitude, per se, i'm good to 9,000 feet right now, i ride that right now. i ride from 7,300 to 8,500' in gravel, on steep, on dirt, on a particular ride i currently do. but, from the visitors center on moana kea, that's already above 9,000', so, yes, i suspect that altitude would wear on me. mostly it's just if it's TOO steep, and TOO sandy, then it's no fun.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Can you swap out the 32 and get a larger rear cog (I assume you have a long cage rear derailleur?). If you can do that, then I think Mauna Kea gravel section is doable. But honestly if you do have to get off and push the bike for a few spots that are too spot here and there, you actually will not be going much slower bike pushing than bike riding. Bike pushing is 5 kph, and you may not even be going at 8-10 kph anyway.

I forgot how high you live so the altitude will bother you less than us sea level people. I say you do it....get Timothy Carlson out to do the pictorial of the adventure. We would like to live vicariously through this adventure. I think it was 2012 when Cementbottle rode from Waikaloa on a rented mountain bike up past the visitor center towards the summit, but he was calculating that he was running out of daylight to summit and make it back to Waikaloa so he had to abandon the summit attempt. I think he was also doing this 1 or 2 days before the Honu 70.3 event.

i can't swap the cassette. i would if i could. i think i'm going to try a wolf tooth dropper, but that doesn't increase the range, it just allows for a more clearance to the largest cog. i'm running SRAM red, wifli, i wouldn't mind going to, say, a 13-36, if i could do it with this drivetrain, i'm running 50x34 so really a 50x13 is okay for me as the largest gear. but i think i'd have to try to custom make that cassette and see if the wifli RD would shift it.

if i go it won't be with a photographer. except me and my iphone.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

If you aren’t feeling up for Kaloko then you should avoid the gravel and even pavement above the gravel on Mauna Kea. Extremely steep even without worrying about traction issues. Add in elevation and you’ll feel even worse.

For most of the same type of views and a couple thousand feet less elevation I’d recommend the Mauna Loa ride. It is spectacular. Depending on where you start the ride from, and how you’re feeling, you can always add on the ride across the road up to the Mauna Loa visitor center.

Mauna Kea is on my bucket list too. I just haven’t been able to pull off coordinating best bike fitness with an island visit and having my gravel bike along instead of tri bike. Seeing some very strong riders complete that climb and many needing footwear that alllows walking sections puts it in perspective for me. Nslckevin had a great online review of his ride up MK a few years ago.

i like your plan. i've never been up the moana loa road. i'd imagine i'll just take the saddle road on the bike until i feel like turning around. seems like a fairly gentle grade (compared to, say, kaloko). it also appears to be a paved road, but, just barely. which suits me fine.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Scout the gravel on Big Island and report to us!
I would love to know if there is good gravel riding over there-

I'll gladly be the camera man. I've been on the big island in Waikoloa (Hali'i Kai) since August 6 and not planning on going home until Thanksgiving or Christmas. Right now all I have is a 7 speed Specialized Roll with about a meter long headtube borrowed from a neighbor, so that might be a deal breaker? At least the tires are fat.

some of us were just talking about you, wondering what happened to you!

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

We’re doing Mauna Kea a week from Monday, with a photographer.

There should also be a Kaloko ‘just because’ ride.

Super cool. It would be nice if you can post a thread from that with pics. Are you guys using gravel bikes for the lava dust section on Mauna Kea?

Sure, can do.

Six of us and we’re trying a variety of setups, from Open UPs to Specialized Diverge to pure gravel bike and road race bike, 1x, 2x and everything from 25-40c tires. Personally I’ll ride an UPPER 1x with 36 x 11-42 and 32c tires, which might or might not get it done on gravel part.

Hoping to come away with a sense of ideal setup to ride whole thing.

I bet YOU will be fine on 36x42. 32mm may or may not work in terms of sinking depending on when the last time the grater went by. But I bet for most of it, you won't sink that much. Are you thinking around 40 psi on 32 mm (keep in mind that your 40 psi inflation at sea level is 30% harder at 10000 ft up). I think 32mm at low enough psi wouldl perhaps cut it. So if you had 32mm and deflated low enough at the visitor center to float over the gravel and then re inflate after the gravel for the rest of the road section and if you are on 36x42 and have "enough watts per kilo" then it could be the perfect set up for the entire climb from sea level (either from Waikaloa or Hilo).

I know this thread has been derailed a bit by Mauna Kea, but I want to second the advice to ride Kaloko - it's one of my favorite climbs I've done anywhere and that includes Mt. Lemmon, and many on the front range in Colorado.

I did that climb in 2014 the Friday after the race - after a couple days of pretty much doing nothing but drinking beer then a few days of hiking various places around the island was pretty well recovered and was basically able to ride at FTP for the nearly hour it took to make the climb, on my TT bike with the same gearing I had during the race (I think 11-23 or 11-25 and 39 in front). I was solidly in the middle of my AG (M30-34) but I am on the lighter side at 145 lbs which helps.

One thing I will warn about though, if you decide to do the last stretch to the radio towers (about 3/4 mile at 10-11%), it's pretty much a straight shot which means you will be riding the brakes HARD on the way down. I blew out BOTH my latex tubes simultaneously (which had held up fine during the race and the last month or so of training up to the race when I installed them). Cause was very minor imperfections in the rim tape/slightly exposed spoke holes, but when the heat-induced pressure gets that high those will be the weak point. Skidded into the dirt and bloodied my knee pretty well. Had to flag down a local who was able to give me a ride back to town - he mentioned that lots of residents higher up on Kaloko go through brakes on their cars pretty regularly. Almost missed my flight back (and would have if not for the ride) as I was doing this ride in the morning of the day I left.

Where are you starting from?

I had to paperboy a lot of the parts above the gravel when I rode up Mauna Kea. I had a 34x32. I'm not sure how much of that was due to the fatigue of having been going hard for 4 hours already, or just how difficult that section is due to the grade and altitude. That was at about 3.3 W/kg for the section from the top of the gravel to the top.

If I was to do Mauna Kea again (hopefully someday), I'd want a smaller low gear (34x36 I think) and of course some much fatter tires than the 25c's I had. I would see if the Wolf Tooth adapter does the trick. I have used it successfully to run a 32 on a normal short cage deraileur. It might do the trick for your 36.

Have fun.

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Kevin

http://kevinmetcalfe.dreamhosters.com
My Strava

I did a "test" a few years ago on Stelvio in terms of watts per Kilo. 7 weeks before Stelvio I did the Muskoka 70.3 at 225W when my FTP was hovering around 265W and I was 63 kilos so around 4.2W per kilo. The purpose of this "test" was to observe wattage decline over altitude. Since I knew I could keep up 225W for 2.5 hours, I figure that given that the Stelvio climb (south side) would be around 1:30 to 1:40 for me, then holding 225W all the way up would be easy.

The motivation behind this altitude field test was to better understand how much I needed to degrade my wattage targets for IM Tahoe which would be 3 weeks later.

Bormio is at 4500 ft and the Stelvio summit at 8800 ft or so (around a few 100 ft lower than Mauna Kea visitor center).

Here is what I observed.

4500-5500 ft, 225W was negligible
5500-6500 ft, 225W felt like 100% FTP
6500-7500 ft, 225W felt like I was in a 10 mile ITT....it felt like 20 minute power
7500-8500 ft, 225W felt like I was running a 1 mile race or the final mile of a 5K race
>8500 ft, 225W felt like I was running a 400m track repeat

225W was roughly 3.6W per kilo

Keep in mind I live at sea level and don't do that great at altitude for whatever reason. When I ran track repeats in Denver, my 400m splits were 5 seconds slower than sea level, so something like 6% worse.

I am not sure what this translates into if I was to try to ride from saddle road to the Mauna Kea summit, but given duration and altitude, I THINK I would need to cap the early climbing at 200W or 3.17W per kilo. Probably keeping it around 180W would be safer given that there is almost 8000 ft of vertical gain just from saddle road to summit and you're ending up at 60% barometric pressure near the top.

In any case, that altitude test worked well at IM Tahoe. I tried to cap the spikes at 200W which seemed insanely ridiculously low on lap 1, but it really worked. If I recally correctly I ended up riding 5:37 at 165W given the 6400 ft altitude. If I used 225W as my 6400 ft altitude FTP, then 165W was 73% FTP which ended up being around right. I think I could calculate rough FTP's for each altitude band to keep the energy metering efficient to make it to the top, but as discussed on this thread, the gravel section throws all that out the window.

that might be perfect from me. but i'm not starting where you're starting, unless you're starting from the junction with the saddle road. i'm riding NOTHING longer than an hour and a quarter these days, and i gave up gruelathons beyond my capacity for my 60th birthday.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Starting at 6am from Waikoloa. Big Island Bike Tours is supporting.

hi 5 me when you pass me by! better yet, a little butt push.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman