PR Hilly Ride

On Thursday, I had a nice 32 mile ride. On Friday, I did a good interval workout on the track. And then on Saturday, it was nice enough to ride again! It was 50 degrees, so I set out for a long-ish ride. I didn't want to go too hard (meaning "too fast") because of my harder workouts the days before, so I told myself that I would ride every hill I could find! And when I got done with 38 miles, my Garmin app told me this:

What's that PR for?...


... It was my most "total ascent" in a ride!

[Also, it's funny to note that my "Longest Ride" PR at the top and my "40 km" speed PR at the bottom were on the same ride. Flat trails out near Alexandria!]

I climbed 2403 feet on a route that is usually around 1200-1400 feet (when not focusing on finding every off-shoot hill). My previous best (as it was listed there) was 2211 feet, and that was my FIRST workout with my FIRST old Garmin in July of 2012: 42 miles in about 2 hrs and 20 mins with an 18.3 mph average. The next closest ascent to that was in Aug of 2017 where I did 1,975 feet over 40 miles which was a similar route to this past weekend with more tacked on SE of downtown St. Paul as well as NW from home along the river.

Here was my overall route (which is VERY similar to my normal route with 12-1400 feet of ascent):

Counter-clockwise loop with an out-and-back to the south.


Elevation on the weekend ride.


An example of 2 "extra" hills along Shepard: down and up
the south Hidden Falls road, and down and up to the marina.


I just needed to go DOWN this curving hill on my route, but instead I went
down, up, and down, and then later when I went by I went up and down it again.


My southern turn-around: down a big hill left of "Sioux Trl," up to the east and south,
and then turning around to go down those 2 hills and up the one left of "Sioux Trl."


An add-on shortly after the turn-around that just kept going up.


Doing Ohio Hill twice! (The tiny loop in the middle was my Ohio turn-around,
and you can see the dark blue line in the upper right where I re-started.)

Here were the hills I hit, to correspond with the map below:

A: down and up Lower Hidden Falls Drive.
B: down and up the road to the Marina (and Crosby Farm).
C: down, up, and down Shepard south of I-35E.
D: up across 35E.
E: down and then up across 35E again.
F: down and up Lilydale Rd from Hwy 13 to the Yacht Club
G: long slow "false flat" climb up Big Rivers.
H: climb along 494 up to Pilot Knob, and then still up along Pilot Knob.
I: up steep hill on Big Rivers just north of I-494.
J: extra off-shoot of Big Rivers up to Pilot Knob Preservation Site.
K: another trip up and down Lilydale Rd from the Yacht Club to Hwy 13.
[Then some flats along Water Street.]
L: up Ohio Hill.
M: up Ohio Hill again.
N: up Ramsey Hill
O: up the very end of the Marshall Hill from the river.

Below are those hills labeled on my map and elevation chart. RED means it was an extra hill off to the side that I tacked on, BLUE means it was hill I rode up or down on my normal route that I then turned around and did again, and GREEN means it was just a hill I did once as part of my normal route:

Looking at that map (and those letters), the lower left quadrant is really loaded up with hills. I could ride that section twice for lots of hills... even though it does NOT contain the "named" hills of Ohio and Ramsey (which are L, M, and N on the map in the NE).

I was HOPING to do Ramsey twice to end the ride, but I was standing and pushing once I had barely started that hill for the first time, and my quads were really screaming. I didn't want to do anything stupid, so I only went up Ramsey once. If I hadn't set a PR for ascent but came really close, I would have been pissed at myself!