Effective Cycling

Every bicycle should have brakes on both wheels, but some don’t; furthermore, single-brake bicycles often have the least effective brake, the coaster brake. For riding in hilly country, you need a rim or disk brake on each wheel, as described in chapter 4.

Climbing over hills or mountains takes more time and energy than a flat-road ride; no matter how good the descent, you cannot recover the lost time and energy. It is also just plain harder; climbing over a mountain range is the most strenuous riding that tourists can do. The trouble is that until you try it you won’t know how mountain climbing affects you. So allow extra time for crossing ridges, and figure out where to stop early if you get too slow or too tired to finish. Climbing hills takes energy and overheats you. Be sure you have extra pocket food and sufficient water and salt to keep yourself going. Often in mountain country there are no sources of food or salt, and in some no water either.

If you ride in mountainous country, you need to own a computerized topographic map system, such as DeLorme’s Topo; these produce maps of exactly the area you will visit and route directions and profiles of your intended route. A profile shows distance and elevation and gradient in a graph; it’s much easier than our old way of working from topographic quadrants with calculator, pencil, and paper.

Study the map before you leave and carry it with you. The important questions to ask are these:

• What is the total climbing elevation gain, that is, the sum of all the gains without subtracting the descents?

If you are working from the typical road map, here is some advice. Find the elevations given along your route. Probably not many are given. About all that ordinary road maps give are the elevations for lakes, major towns, and some major high peaks and passes. Just as important, but not given, are the bottoms where the road crosses a river or valley.

Look for the elevations given, and try to decide what the general elevation range is. Towns and lakes are often in low spots; highest peaks are above the road at passes. You may have anywhere from 1,000 to 7,000 feet net climb in a day’s ride. Then look at the river pattern. (Of course, a topographic map will have all these details, but most road maps are very sketchy.) If the road follows up one river valley to a pass and then down another valley, you won’t have much more climbing than the net difference between bottom and top. But if the map shows the road crossing a series of creeks or rivers as it goes from one watershed to another (different main rivers), there is an extra climb and descent between every one.

This geography can double or triple your actual climbing for the day. Look also for indications of ridge lines or mountains—you can often guess where the highest points of the road are from these. Look for any snake-like wiggles on the road map—these are sure indications of steep country. The best maps show the grade percentages. Grades up to 4 percent slow you but don’t require strain. The normal good highway maximum is 6 percent, and as you know, that can be a hard pull. Over 6 percent requires hard riding, but grades of up to 15 percent can be climbed for considerable distances. You can get some clue to average grade by comparing miles to elevation gain. Divide feet gained by miles to get feet per mile. Fifty feet per mile is 1 percent grade, so 200 feet per mile is 4 percent grade, etc. But remember that actual grades over particular sections may well be twice the average grade, depending on how carefully the road was engineered and how much the designers were prepared to spend on it.

The only training for hill climbing is hill climbing. The nearest substitute is grinding along in too high a gear against the wind, but even that is not the same. So if you live in flat country, plan on time for further conditioning after you reach the mountains. For instance, some Florida cyclists joined a one-week tour over the medium California mountains. They had trained on the only hill they could find—a multifloor parking building. But even that did not develop their stamina sufficiently, so they had to quit because the other riders were used to hills, whereas they were not. On the other hand, 47 California riders who were used to California mountains rode an 8-day tour, the first Sierra Super Tour, averaging over 100 miles a day and 7,000 feet of climb per day and had no dropouts.

The first thing to remember is that you slow down on climbs much more than motorists do. Furthermore, at low speeds, roadside hazards are not so dangerous, so you can stay further right with safety. Stay far right and let the cars past.

Use your gears intelligently. Don’t stay in high gear until it hurts before changing. Rather, attempt to keep your feet moving at normal cadence, and change down as you slow down. In theory, a completely adequate set of gears would enable you to climb any hill at near optimum effort, pedal cadence, and leg force, but that can’t be accomplished. Plan to work harder on hills than on the level. You should attempt to do this by increasing leg effort moderately without decreasing pedal cadence, because the only other chance is to increase leg effort enormously to provide the additional power despite the decreased pedal speed. So use your gears to keep up your pedal cadence. Only when you get to your lowest gear should you permit yourself to be forced into slower pedal speed and much greater effort.

Pace yourself so that you can reach the top without exhaustion. When you approach a mountain range, look for the valley that guides the road and attempt to see the pass. When you get a little closer, you will find that the foothills obscure the view, so do your looking early. Estimate the distance to the top. Identify some landmarks, if you can see any. For example, you may see the notch in the hillside where the road passes a prominent nose, and that may look about halfway up. Look for power poles—they nearly always aim directly for the lowest pass where the road is, and can be seen at much greater distance than the road. If nothing else, remember what the map showed about total miles and climb. Then get going at a pace that you think that you can maintain, and grind out the miles.

You will find the cross slope of the road more hindering than on the level. Your bike tends to turn downhill, so on right turns you tend to run off the edge, but on banked left turns you tend to run to the center. When tired on a grade, this requires a bit of concentration to resist, or you will find yourself on a left turn dropping to the center of the road and facing a worse climb up the banking to the side when you hear a car behind. On a very twisty road, the major switchback curves are steeper than the rest. If it is really lonely, pick your course by your gear. If you are undergeared, shortcut the corners to get the shortest distance for the climb. If you are overgeared, go round the outside of the curve to get the least grade.

At the bottom of the climb you just work a bit harder, often getting your hands down on the drops to help. As the effort increases, you want to stand on the pedals, but it is generally better to stay seated as much as you can. To get better breathing, move your hands up to the top of the bars, so you sit up straighter. Then, as a last resort, move your hands to the brake lever bracket and stand on the pedals. Standing up is best done in short stretches to change your posture and exercise different muscles.

Wipe the sweat out of your eyes, eat some pocket food, and take a swig of water frequently. You may be climbing for 20 minutes only or for 3 hours—so pace yourself to complete it.

Descending carries the opposite problems. You travel as fast as the cars; at higher speeds, roadside hazards are more dangerous. Therefore, take a lane unless the shoulder is as good as the lane. Place your hands on the front of the bars below the brake levers, with your fingers over the brake levers, gripping the bars between thumbs and fingers. Slide back on your saddle.

Swing the curves gradually, slowly leaning over and increasing the turn, then slowly straightening up. Approach left curves at the right edge, slowly move toward the center of the road halfway round the curve, and drift back to the edge as you come out of the turn. On right turns, approach in the center, move slowly to the right edge halfway through, then drift back to center. Always keep your inside pedal high if you are not pedaling, to minimize the chance of scraping it.

On a smooth-surfaced road without gravel, you can safely lean over far enough to scrape a pedal in the low position, but not so far on a slippery surface. It takes practice and skill to know how fast you can approach the next turn you see in the road, so speed up gradually, afterward testing your impression of the turn and your speed against the amount of lean you needed to go around it. Avoid bumps, gravel, lane-line buttons, and reflector buttons, because any bump that you hit while you are leaned over for a turn can dump you immediately.

Use your brakes equally so that one rim doesn’t get all the heat. Using 50 percent more force on the rear lever will compensate for the extra cable friction.

You cannot turn hard and brake at the same time. Your tires have only so much grip on the road, and that grip can be used either to turn you or to slow you. If you must do both at once, the amount of each must be reduced. The best rules are: don’t turn and brake at the same time, and don’t brake while you are leaning over for a turn. You should brake before each turn, getting down to the speed for the turn before you enter it. On twisty roads, the way to brake is suddenly and hard just as you cross over from one turn to another, or on any bit of straight. The worst turns are switchback turns, because these are very sharp, make a complete change of direction, and are the steepest places on the descent. Approach these very slowly, because you must brake through the turn because it is so steep there. You can’t be slowing down from high speed, turning sharply, and preventing the steep grade from making you go faster, all at the same time.

You may find that your steering assembly (front wheel, fork, handlebars) starts to oscillate badly at high speed. Grip the handlebars firmly, squeeze the top tube between your knees to dampen the oscillation as much as possible, and brake hard. The causes of speed instability can be easy to fix, such as by truing a wheel, or they can be almost impossible to discover. See chapter 3. Anyway, there is only one thing to do during the trip—don’t go fast enough to start the oscillation.

At high speeds, wind gusts will blow you further across the road before you have control again, so be extra careful in windy places.

Your first mountain descent will be slow—you will be too frightened to do anything else. But later you may approach a curve too fast—or, in your learning stage, you might believe that you have approached it too fast. You have two choices—risking running off the road headfirst in a somersault, or risking sliding off feet first on your side. It is always better to slide off than to somersault off, but your instincts force you to somersault off if you don’t master them. Here is what happens. You feel that the curve is too sharp and your wheels are getting too close to the edge. So you keep your wheels as far from the edge as you can—which prevents you from increasing your lean and therefore prevents you from tightening your turn. You must lean more to turn more—remember that. Your fears lock you into your existing turn radius because you are afraid to let your wheels get closer to the edge. So you drift gradually off the road at high speed, and somersault over the first rock.

What you must do is just like an instant turn to get away from a car. You must very carefully swing your wheels toward the edge of the road to increase your lean. Then you can fight away from that edge because your turn is tighter than the curvature of the road. Naturally you must do this before your wheels are at the edge—it takes forethought and courage. The chances are that you won’t skid off the road, because there is normally some margin of safety in what you think is dangerous, but if you are going too fast for the curve you will skid. Then you go down on your side, sliding off the road feet first. That takes a lot of skin, but skin grows back; heads don’t.

When you approach the bottom, be careful of your knees. Knees are damaged by hard cycling after a cold rest—get them carefully warmed up first. Pedal on the downhills in cool weather to keep them warmed up, then turn on the power gradually at the bottom, even though this loses you some coasting speed up the next hill. Quick movement doesn’t hurt, but strong leg force does. The symptom is all too common—a quick uphill sprint after a long downhill with sharp pains in the knees as the cartilage cracks. This damage can be permanent, so don’t run the risk.

There is a real challenge in mountain cycling. Figures 37.1 and 37.2 show the gradient profile of two Sierra passes we climbed on successive days: Ebbetts and Sonora. These profiles were drawn by John Finley Scott from topographical maps for his guides for the Diablo Wheelmen Sierra Super Tours.

Figure 37.1

Pass storming at Ebbett’s Pass; the most difficult climbs are in the direction that is mostly downhill.

Figure 37.2

Pass storming at Sonora Pass

Having described the first 65 miles (with 5,900 feet of elevation gain) of Sonora Pass in a paragraph, Scott describes the steep part of Sonora Pass in these words:

There is no road in the Sierra like Sonora Pass. Just as the first accounts of the Sierra’s Giant Sequoia trees were not believed (no tree could be that big!) until parties were organized to verify their existence, so accounts of this pass by cyclists seem incredible (no road can be that steep!) until the incredulous bikie makes the crossing himself. Our prediction for the first Sierra Super Tour (1975) holds true today: “Sonora Pass will prove to be a veritable Gethsemane for riders not equipped with unusually low gears.” This is where 42 × 21 transmissions pray for relief under Chapter 11.

Both sides of the pass are severe, and the west’s “Q’ de Porca” and “Golden Stairs” sections are steeper than anything else in California’s state highway system except the short Pacific Grade on Ebbett’s Pass. To be sure, the average grade from the Baker snow gate to the summit is only 7.1% for 8.97 miles, and long grades over 7% await cyclists on many California state highways, to say nothing of county roads. But the exclusion of a 1.8 mile section on Sonora’s west side near the 8000-ft. contour (which includes a 150 ft. retrograde) raises its average grade to 8.87%, and the dispersion from this average is extreme. Let us therefore study this classic ascent in more detail.

Sonora Pass is steep because it was built “quick-&-dirty” in the 1870’s as a wagon road to the booming mining camp of Bodie (east of Bridgeport). An easier grade (say 12%) at the Q’ de Porca would have involved expensive corniche construction on loose steep rock, while easing the Golden Stairs would have involved switchbacks in the granite terraces to the north or expensive bridging and exposure to recurring avalanche damage on the east side of Deadman Creek. Traffic today is moderate and State plans to improve the road (including a once-proposed tunnel) have never survived high costs and the existence of easier parallel routes.

The classic old alignment—essentially unchanged since World War II—starts at the Clark’s Fork junction, where the modern road bears left (as part of a plan to replace the climb up Deadman Creek with an easier one up the Clark Fork), and California #108 bears right. The road narrows and its intrusion on the natural landscape diminishes. Except for some short steep pitches the climb through the pleasant Eureka Valley is only a diverting prelude to the extreme adversity that lies ahead.

Past Dardanelle resort you climb to the old Baker maintenance station and soon come to the snow gate with legendary laconic warning sigh: SONORA PASS AHEAD / STEEP AND WINDING ROAD / HOUSE TRAILERS NOT ADVISABLE. Now begins the test you are here to meet: your pulse races and adrenalin ties knots in your stomach; here is the Place of Truth; this is the hour of reckoning; your judgment is come.

Seize the moment! With unwavering resolution you ride boldly through the gate then shift directly to your lowest gear for reasons that will quite soon become apparent. The first grade that you see is steep but deceptive, as it worsens around the curve. As you climb the view opens up to Kennedy Meadow and the great bulk of Leavitt Peak. Now lift your eyes to the left wall. Look upon that incredible road, audacious climber, and despair! What you now face is the legendary “Q’ de Porca” incline, 0.84 miles averaging 13%—too long for a heroic charge in oxygen debt. The grade worsens. If the road is sandy your rear wheel may spin if you stand, yet stay in the saddle and pedalling torque will unload the front wheel and destabilize steering. Now the road winds right and left on constant reverse curves, while the view improves rapidly. Now you draw on your reserves, for the next 0.55 miles lift you 443 feet for an average grade of 15.1%. Finally you approach the rock defile of the Q’ de Porca, where raw courage (aided perhaps by unusually low gears) will bring salvation, for God hates a coward.

The grade increases now still more to well over 20% in the defile, and you will be pleased to learn that this is the worst pitch on the whole ascent. Just past the defile your ordeal is interrupted by a short level section, followed by a long incline that elsewhere would be fearful but here is relatively mild: 1.8 miles at an unrelenting 9.6%. You round a switchback and climb along a steep hillside, with the grade easing near the first “Elevation 8000 Ft” sign. The next 1.8 miles (including the 150 foot descent), average only 2.5%. But at the second “Elevation 8000 Ft” sign the iron discipline of the western slope resumes. The next 1.79 miles to the “Elevation 9000 Ft” sign average 10.7%. But for 1.2 miles of this the grade is only 7.5%, and so we may calculate what greater travail is yet to come. Along a short tangent, where the road bears directly toward the rock wall ahead, you can see the gradient increase sharply. You have now arrived at the “Golden Stairs” section, named for the yellowish granite terraces on the cliff to your left. Peaks and precipices are at every hand, winter’s snows repose in rubble-strewn avalanche chutes, the environment is wild and desolate in the extreme, and the only human intrusion is the precarious road you are about to ascend. For 0.49 miles from the first left-hand turn sweeping curves and a stiffening grade lift you toward the “Elevation 9000 Ft” sign on an average gradient of 16.9%. Finally the roads turns sharply left to parallel the steepening gorge of Deadman Creek. You look up the road to see, first, the elevation sign, and second, a further increase in the grade. But worse is to come! Past a curve to the left the grade increases again: here, at 9000 feet, after the arduous climb from the Baker snow gate 3000 feet below, you must ascend a grade of 20% for 800 feet. Like the hard fists of the Zen Master, whose silent blows open your eyes to wisdom, this dreadful journey to the limits of strength and endurance leads you to realize what abstract exposition alone cannot: that Truth, Beauty, Empire and Victory inhere in small chainwheels.

Yet relief awaits. The grade now quickly recedes to less than 10%. You enter an open alpine basin, and the last 2.48 miles climb at an average of only 4%. Sweeping curves and a rising grade lie just below the summit: the Mono County Line, a new highway district, your first view of the high desert ranges to the east, tourists and well-wishers, and a sign announcing “Sonora Pass / Elevation 9624 Feet.” Virtue and honor stand reclaimed, the noble battle is over, and your side has won.

Steep, winding descents create unusual problems for cyclists. On gentle or straight descents most of the cyclist’s potential energy is dissipated through aerodynamic drag and brakes are only lightly used. On grades such as we now face brakes are used very heavily indeed: this heats the rims and leads to problems. Most cyclists inadvertently use the front brake much more than the rear. Hence to maximize your rims’ capacities as heat sinks, load the rear wheel equally with the front (check rim temperature by hand, but with care—they can get very hot). Riders with sew-up tires should note that most ordinary rim cements soften badly when hot, causing tires to creep under brake loads. This can lead to tire failure and crashes. Sew-up riders should thus stop as necessary to check rim temperature and to cool them by waiting or by dipping them in roadside streams. And you can compensate for front-wheel tire creep by frequently reversing its direction of rotation. I recommend “3M” brand trim cement as a robust, heat-resistant rim cement (it is a favorite with trackies).

The east side of Sonora Pass is less severe than the west (averaging 6.5% from the summit to Leavitt Meadow) but it does have its moments of adventure and so a cautious descent is well-advised. Leaving the summit you accelerate down a 13% grade before your feet are firmly in the clips and hurtle through gully corners (watch for sand). If the climb had wet pavement from snowmelt, the descent will be wet also, so use additional caution in descending. You roll through a roller-coaster gully crossing, behind whose blind crest lies a curve featuring reverse camber, sand, and other disamenities. Other surprise curves abound. An easier passage takes you past Sardine Meadow and Falls. After the Leavitt Lake junction a deceptive tangent leads abruptly to a short, sharp, steep, bumpy switchback. Further down, where a sweeping view of the Sweetwater Mountains lies directly ahead, the grade increases again to 13% and you swing right on to the long Leavitt Meadow switchback. At its bottom you round a steep left turn—the “Dynaflow Curve,” so named for the Dynaflow Buicks with burnt-out brakes which in the 1950s frequently impaled themselves on the guardrail. A candid revision of the Baker advisory sign might simply state that “Sonora Pass is not advisable for klutzim and flatlanders.” (From John F. Scott’s prospectuses for the Sierra Super Tours, first organized by him in 1975, later by Diablo Wheelmen)