Uncharted Territory

With so many intrepid cyclists exploring every possible uphill in the Bay Area, it seems improbable that one might discover a new climb. Imagine my surprise to be introduced to a challenging and apparently unfamiliar road last week. Impressions of a road's grade from the seat of a car can be misleading; the only sure way to know is to get on the bike and head for the top. It didn't look impossible.

Our club rates hills on a subjective scale from 3 to 6, where "3" is noticeably uphill and "6" means I need lower gears than I have. My sense was that this new hill could be a 6. Or a 5. Probably not a 4, but I certainly wouldn't complain if it turned out that way.

I persuaded some friends and my regular ride partner to go exploring with me. Our 40-mile menu included a few of the club's 3-rated hills along the way to today's featured special, Country View Drive. As soon as we rounded the corner, there were a few [unprintable] exclamations of, er, delight.

I am totally in the wrong gear!

This is definitely not a "3"!

Four out of the five of us made it to the summit. The fifth was running low on water and looks forward to returning on a cooler day.

The vote at the top: one hypoxic abstention, two for "6," and a "5" from the Canadian judge. The grade of the climb is uneven, and interrupted by two descents. Factoring out that half mile or so, we climbed 710 feet over about 1.3 miles. Including a brief scenic detour on a steep side street, and those two intervening climbs on the way down, we used less than two miles of pavement to climb 930 feet.

If you haven't done something like this on a bicycle, let me explain that this is hard. Really hard. It hurts. On the steepest section, I sustained an average heart rate of 182 beats per minute for more than five minutes to generate a forward pace of 4.1 mph (i.e., to stay upright).

At the end of the day, everyone was still talking to me. Even before we played in the fountain.