Spring Series - Snake RR

Snake was fast this year. The C group was climbing it about 10-15 seconds (est) faster than we did it two years ago. My times where from 1:50 to about 2:10-2:15. Two years ago 2:0 to about 2:20-2:30. I was doing sag climbs (first onto the climb and last off the climb.)

I managed to be off the climb and close enough that I could TT back onto the main group every lap except the last. Ended up with two other dropped riders who couldn't help me and ended up dropping off leaving me to follow the field at a distance and finish about 500m behind.

Ah the joys of a Class TimeTriallist Power Profile :-) Nothing much for 5sec, 1min (untrained, Cat 5 on a very very good day.) And Cat 3 for 5 minute and 1 hour.


Overall my 8th for the Crit and 1st for the TT got me 2nd overall for the Omnium. Probably should have been 3rd as one of the leaders didn't race on Sunday. If that rider had started on Sunday they would have had (at least) 2nd and I would have been 3rd.

So what does it take to climb Snake and can I do it faster; or why do I sag climb?

I used a spreadsheet available from the wattage forum (tt_analysis.xls). It allows you to enter distances, grades, power for a tt course and get an idea of how to pace it.

In this case I just set the segments to all be 500m, 11% grade, then various multiples of ftp. This is shown in the chart as the red line. Effectively power required to climb for a specific number of seconds.

The second line is the Mean Maximal Power numbers (copy raw from WKO chart). Note the cross over at 130 seconds. This indicates that (at least as far as the model is accurate) that it is unlikely I can do this climb very much faster than 130 seconds. For example to get down to 110 seconds (about what the lead climbers where doing) I would need to do about 450 watts for 110 seconds. And according to the MMP chart (which is my best efforts over the last 28 days) my best effort over 110 seconds is about 375 watts. I would need to add 75 watts to that.

On the other hand the 130 seconds matches fairly closely the times I did get.