Pilot Rock, Pisgah National Forest, NC. File photo: HPeterson4 It seems like everywhere I travel, the locals want to boast about how challenging their trails are. Depending on where I am on the continent, I’ve heard the terms “Pisgah miles,” “Sedona miles,” “North Shore miles,” and most recently, “Adirondack miles” bandied around.
What’s with this masochistic pride in the difficulty of one’s local trails? And how exactly do you know that your local trails are more difficult than somebody else’s? Well, if you want to determine how difficult your next mountain bike ride will be and benchmark it against other rides you’ve been on, here’s a totally scientific formula to calculate ride difficulty with 100% certainty: Ride difficulty = # of miles X (elevation gain/miles) X (trail roughness/miles) This formula includes three different variables. Let’s look at each of them. Altai Mountains. File photo: Edward Shoote Variable 1: # of miles, i.e. ride distance
All else being equal, a longer mountain bike ride is more difficult than a shorter one. The total number of miles is often the top-line statistic that I look at to determine a ride’s difficulty, but the problem is, “all else” is rarely equal.
The mileage metric is really only useful if you’re comparing one ride in a trail system to another ride in that same trail system or in extremely similar terrain. Once the other variables begin to change, we need to dive deeper into the formula. File photo : Brian Barnhart Variable 2: (elevation […]
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