I am leading a ride tomorrow that has three good size hills. It is challenging for some of the regular C riders from the club but doable, and that is the description I have had to fall back on. I have been interested in quantfiying it better for my own benefit at least, if not the rest of the club. I am one of the more numerically inclined members.
When I mapped on routeslip.com, the program reported that it had about 1900 ft of climbing over the 36 miles of the route, but none of the three climbs seemed to be more than 300 feet high. It seemed odd that we would do 1000 feet of climbing when we felt we were on the flats. The other two mapping services, gmap pedometer and mapmyride.com that I use do not report the total distance climbed. However, I discovered today that mapmyride would dump a comma separated values file with distance and the elevation.
I read the data into a spreadsheet and wrote some functions to calculate the distance climbed and the distance descended. The points are 0.07 miles apart. The points along the map that I selected were not that close, so the program is collecting data along the route between my points. When I analyzed the data I found that I had climbed 1347 feet and I had descended 1367 feet. Since the ride ends back at the start the those two distances should be the same. Therefore there is a systematic uncertainity of at least 1% in the method. That is not too bad.
