Flatlanders Heights

[ornoth_cycling]

I keep saying Pittsburgh is much hillier than Boston. Guessing that you might discount that as hyperbole, I ran some numbers to back me up.

In Boston, I’m used to clubs rating their rides by their average speed; the fast group might do 21 mph, the medium group does 17, and the “leisure” group just hangs with the slowest rider.

When I looked at the club rides here in Pittsburgh, I found that in addition to average pace, they’re also rated by how much climbing you can expect. The ratings are determined by the number of vertical feet of climbing there are per horizontal mile (ascent/distance). Something like this, in fact:

Rating	Feet/Mile	Description
0	150+	Hill repeats
1	100+	Hill mania. Hills, hills and more hills
2	80+	Some long and/or steep hills
3	60+	Mostly rolling with moderate hills
4		Mostly flat to rolling with an occasional hill
5		Flat rail-trail with no hills

I had no idea where my typical Boston rides would fall on that scale, so I consulted my cycling log/database to calculate the feet per mile of all my previous rides, then sorted them from highest to lowest (throwing out rides of less than 10 miles). Here’s the top sixteen:

Rank	Date	Ride	Feet/Mile
1	07/2013	Summit Ave hill reps	121.2
2	07/2010	Summit Ave hill reps	105.8
3	12/2015	Braddock PA	94.6
4	12/2015	Braddock PA	94.3
5	01/2016	Fox Chapel PA	81.8
6	06/2011	Jay Peak VT	77.9
7	01/2016	Schenley PA	76.1
8	06/2010	Prospect Hill reps	69.7
9	07/2012	Belgrade ME	67.2
10	06/2013	Spring/Eastern hill reps	67.2
11	07/2012	Spring/Eastern hill reps	65.9
12	07/2011	Spring/Eastern hill reps	64.8
13	07/2011	Spring/Eastern hill reps	63.1
14	07/2014	Spring/Eastern hill reps	62.3
15	04/2012	Barre MA	60.8
16	07/2012	Great Blue Hill reps	60.0

A lot of things jump out at me from this data.

Firstly, nine of my sixteen overall steepest rides were hill repeat workouts, where I went to the most punishing hill I could find and rode up it six or eight times in a row. Those are “workouts” rather than your average, normal “rides”, and they’re of no value in judging how flat or hilly the terrain is.

Next is that only three of those sixteen are what I’d call “normal rides” that predate my move. At 78 feet/mile, my 2011 ride of Jay Peak in Vermont is the steepest, followed by a 2012 ride up in Maine, and a ride from Worcester to Barre MA (both in the moderate 60 feet/mile range).

But those were all special trips away from home; none of them actually started in Boston! The first “normal” ride that started at home and wasn’t a hill repeat appears at #17, at 59 feet/mile.

That leaves four remaining rides in the top sixteen to talk about, all having a feet/mile ratio above 70. Without planning it or going out of my way to make it happen, four of my seven steepest rides happened in the past six weeks, since I moved to Pittsburgh.

Those four rose 95, 95, 82, and 76 feet per mile, earning a tepid “some long or steep hills” from the local bike club. In comparison, my Mt. Washington Century ride in New Hampshire—which crosses three named passes in the White Mountains and bills itself as “New England’s Most Challenging Century™”—only racks up 54 feet/mile, which the Pittsburgh club would dismiss as “rolling with an occasional hill”.

If we throw out all those atypical hill repeat workouts and only include “normal” rides, then my three steepest rides of all time—and four of my top five—all took place here!

You can guess what the bottom line is: on average, Pittsburgh is a whole lot lumpier than Boston. Just for giggles, I went back to my database to quantify that. Here’s the results, adding up all my rides since I started tracking them with GPS in 2010:

Boston	31.4 feet/mile
Pittsburgh	69.5 feet/mile

While living in Boston from 2010 through 2015, I averaged 31.4 feet/mile, with a maximum of 34.5 back in 2014. While I’ve only done nine rides in Pittsburgh, so far I’m averaging no less than 69.5 feet per mile. That’s better than twice as much climbing as Boston without even trying, and that nine-ride average is steeper than any single ride I ever did from my home in Boston, except for my most intense hill repeat workouts.

I dunno if that Pittsburgh average is going to stand for a full season—I’m kinda scared to find out!—but I can already tell that the climbing (and, god help me, the descending) will feature prominently in my ride reports as well as my eventual look back on 2016 and my first season in the Burgh.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

As someone who grew up near-ish to Pittsburgh and now lives around Boston, I didn't think that was hyperbolic *at all* ;) With rare exceptions (e.g. Concord Ave in Belmont), this whole area feels more or less flat to me.