Hill Training for the Death Ride

The Death Ride is now just a couple of weeks away. In preparation, I've been doing a significant number of long climbing rides, including several good ones this month alone. Today was probably my next-to-last opportunity to ride before the big event and I wanted to work on some climbing at a moderate effort that I feel I could maintain for the entire 125 miles of the Death Ride. I rode with a heart rate monitor and tried to keep my rate at or below 150BPM while climbing some of the steeper grades on Mt. Tam. I'm not trying to geek out here like Loren (Mr. Heart Rate and Training Zone guy himself), but it was a worthwhile experiment.

I rode from home up to the top of Mt. Tam, then did a few repeats back down to Pantoll and across the 7 Sisters. The profile is below, as well as a shot of my zones. I think I succeeded pretty well at keeping my heart rate where I wanted it, and I felt totally fine on the climbs. I'll try this approach on the ride itself in a couple of weeks.

Zone ........... Range (bpm) .............Time in Zone
Zone 5 .........168 - 187 ....................0h 02m (1%)
Zone 4 .........150 - 168 ...................0h 35m (19%)
Zone 3 .........131 - 150 ...................1h 42m (57%)
Zone 2 .........112 - 131 ....................0h 35m (19%)
Zone 1 ...........94 - 112 ....................0h 28m (15%)