x miles at x% grade =
If there is a painfully simplistic answer, please keep in mind I still have dreams that I never fulfilled my college math requirement.
That was over a decade ago…
Thanks.
Berti
Keep it simple and use a topo map.
I use this…
For practical purposes one percent grade means 1 foot of vertical for 100 feet of travel. A mile is 5280 feet, so 1% for a mile is 53 feet of vertical. 10% for a mile is 528 feet of vertical. So, for example, 5% for 5 miles is 264 feet per mile times 5, or about 1320 feet.
If you want meters, well, a meter is about 3.28 feet. Or, you can start with 1609 meters in a mile and give yourself 16 meters of gain for each % in the grade, per mile.
Working backwards may be more applicable to real life where you know your starting and ending elevation and how far you rode, but not necessarily the percentage grade of the entire road - particularly since it’s bound to vary quite a bit. For example if you figure Mt. Palomar tops out at about 5200ft, and you start at 1000ft, and it’s 11.7 miles (figures from a Slowman article), then your average grade for that stretch is (4000/(11.7*5280)), or about 6.4%.
% grade can be thought of as “rise over run”, so a 100% grade is a 45 degree slope. There’s some engineering mumbo jumbo having to do with whether the run is the distance traveled on the road, or the distance above an imaginary level road (the hypotenuse vs. the base of the triangle) but for grades that are reasonable to ride up it doesn’t really make much difference.
Buy my Polar S720 for $200 shipped, it does it all (and much much much much more) for you.
How can I figure out the % grade of some of my local hills?
Thanks for the artistry, the shot at a Polar720 , and to skip for some #'s I can actually get my brain around!
B-
uhm… it’s known that 10% grade = 100m vertical gain in 1000 meters. If it’s like 14% you know that in 1000 meters you gain verticaly 140m and so on.
Find the starting elevation, finishing elevation, and distance and work backwards using the formula described above. That’ll give you the average elevation gain. Or do a search on Google - chances are someone’s already done the calculations.
x miles at x% grade =
If there is a painfully simplistic answer, please keep in mind I still have dreams that I never fulfilled my college math requirement.
x miles at y% grade = x * *y ** 52.8 feet elevation gain
However, here’s a website that every American Triathlete should have in his favourites list: http://www.topozone.com
It gives a detailed contour map of most areas in the US, so you can easily calculate the elevation gain on your favourite run or bike loop, albeit manually.
Examples:
let me just tell u something…
the % grade of a road isn’t the angle that the road does with an horizontal line. It’s in fact the result of the equation → meters gain vertically / meters walked = X * 100
so this means that a 90% climb isn’t vertical.
kreps check out the race report i sent ya
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