I Fought the Hill and the Hill Won!

This morning I went for my first serious hill bike ride with my training partners and sadly the hill won. It turns out that somewhat unbeknown to us we selected a particularly challenging first ride in Sierra rd in San Jose. Sierra rd rises up from the valley floor straight into the foothills in the east and apparently this is one of the toughest rides in the east bay.

It has an average grade of 10% over the course of a couple of miles. At some stages it touches a 20% grade which is hard to walk up let alone bike up!! We climed 1100 vertical ft in around 2 miles so the math confirms the grade. (1100ft/10560ft = 10.4% for those that are wondering)

Now I breath deeply when I run but was sucking in huge gulps of air as I tried to climb the monster. So much so that I think my lungs (or the muscles around them) will be sore tomorrow.

We rode up for about 50 minutes and that still did not take us to the top. While my other training partners fared better than me no one was without pain and suffering.

Here is a link to Sierra rd in Google maps. If you use the terrain view you can see we basically climbed straight from the start near Piedmont rd.

http://maps.google.com/maps?sourceid=navclient&rlz=1T4GFRG_enUS214US214&q=map+sierra+rd+san+jose+ca&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us&ei=8dfgSfrCMJm6sgPgjZmsCQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1
our goal is to be able to ride over to that hill from our house and THEN ride the hill. We all agreed that this would have to be an end of summer goal.

Until then I need to find some easier hill rides!

p.s. and was I able to ride the entire way? No, had to walk a few portions near the top as my legs simply didn't have more go.