600,000

Perhaps one reader will recognize what this post is about from the title. At the beginning of this year, Alex and I began keeping tabs on our total climbing. I often wondered how much climbing I did in a year. I guess maybe 500,000 vertical feet, but really had no idea. I never tracked it. I did know that my 10 biggest vertical rides last year netted well over 100,000ft. So in January, I began logging my vertical from skiing, riding and hiking. Most of it was measured with a Garmin Edge 705 GPS. Some of it was taken from DeLorme Topo. A small amount was estimated.

You may have read about Mark Weir, the pro mountain biker that took a challenge to climb 1,000,000 feet in a year. He did it in 11 months, mostly on a mountain bike, and got much publicity for it in the bike mags. That seemed like an awful lot, nearly 3000ft per day on average.

For a while, Alex was ahead of me. But things like trips to Hawaii and North Carolina in the spring quickly catapulted me ahead. Then throw in a Colorado trip in August for another spike-up. These can all be spotted in the plot below. Yesterday's ski pushed me above 600,000ft. That means I climbed on average 1700ft per day this year.  Take out rest days, this average approaches 2000ft per day of activity.  I haven't tallied up how much climbing was on dirt, snow or road, other than a quick scan suggests about 62,000ft was on skate skis. Much more than this would have been MTB on dirt. A million feet in a year doesn't seem like a lot anymore. I have no desire to try something like that. The last time I set a silly goal of riding over 10,000 miles in one year, I had abysmal race results. At my age, I've learned quality pays better dividends than quantity.

I won't track my vertical progress next year. I already capture too many details in my training log. In fact, I'll probably delete the HR and power columns in the spreadsheet while I'm at it. It was interesting to track climbing this year. Now I have a baseline by which to compare going forward.