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news
Craig CannonHow much?!? US rider climbs most vertical metres in 48hrs on Strava
US rider Craig Cannon has unofficially broken the world record for climbing the most vertical metres in 48 hours: a massive 29,146m. That’s 95,623 feet, or well over three times the height of Mount Everest. The previous best was 94,452ft (28,789m).
Cannon (in the Hawaiian shirt, centre), of Oakland, California, covered a distance of 339.5 miles and had a moving time of nearly 43hrs during that 48hr period, according to data he has uploaded to Strava.
Cannon broke the record by completing 227 laps of a short route in Tilden Regional Park in the East Bay, part of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Cannon says that he used a 50/34-tooth chainset matched up to an 11-32-tooth cassette, and that he picked his course carefully.
“I was looking for a very consistent grade that I knew I could ride all day,” he said. “Anything steeper was out because it'd be too hard without crazy gearing… and anything less than 9 or 10% would've meant using energy against wind resistance vs energy for climbing the hill.”
NBC Bay Area reported that Cannon had run 13.1miles, a half-marathon, before his record-breaking ride.
According to his Strava feed, Cannon expended nearly 30,000 calories in setting the record, and for that reason his priorities have shifted for a while.
“I’m focusing on records that involve sitting at home and eating pizza,” he said.
Mat has been in cycling media since 1996, on titles including BikeRadar, Total Bike, Total Mountain Bike, What Mountain Bike and Mountain Biking UK, and he has been editor of 220 Triathlon and Cycling Plus. Mat has been road.cc technical editor for over a decade, testing bikes, fettling the latest kit, and trying out the most up-to-the-minute clothing. We send him off around the world to get all the news from launches and shows too. He has won his category in Ironman UK 70.3 and finished on the podium in both marathons he has run. Mat is a Cambridge graduate who did a post-grad in magazine journalism, and he is a winner of the Cycling Media Award for Specialist Online Writer. Now over 50, he's riding road and gravel bikes most days for fun and fitness rather than training for competitions.
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21 comments
And 339 miles!
Given that my garmin also records temperature I always assumed that the barometric altimeter corrected for temperature. Can't do pressure though. I guess in 48hrs there could be significant change.
Right, but climbing from 0 to 500 may register as 0 to 700 if the temperature drops by two degrees while you're doing it. Unless the unit already knows that the top of that hill is 500, in which case it knows that the temperature has changed and can factor that into the rest of its calculations.
Edit: X-posted with Paul, but it can cause very significant levels of error, in my experience. I had an 800m differential one time, climbing the Madone as the evening fell.
My wife is in her 71st year and climbed Stoke Park in Bristol in 3 mins 19 secs. Whoohoo whoop whoop
My wife is in her 71st year and climbed Stoke Park in Bristol in 3 mins 19 secs. Whoohoo whoop whoop
My wife is in her 71st year and climbed Stoke Park in Bristol in 3 mins 19 secs. Whoohoo whoop whoop
Yep. At an extreme, if I add every centimetre-high perturbation on a "perfectly flat", or even downhill, road, I'll start to rack up quite a bit of vertical gain on paper. Different systems will give completely different measures; this only means that cross-system comparisons are meaningless. Within a particular measuring system, comparisons of different efforts are pretty accurate.
Strava can be a bit erratic when there are significant temperature changes on your ride, in fairness, but it does let you override its gain calculations if your GPS device has its own altimeter.
Ack, though the blame there lies more with the GPS device and the inherent nature of barometric altimeters.
You need to do what pilots do, and calibrate the barometric altimeter to the known local pressure (when pilots fail to do this you get things like that famous Airbus crash, where the pilot flew into the trees at the end of the runway doing a low flyby!).
Some GPS devices have means for this, e.g. Garmin lets you set "elevation points" - GPS co-ordinates and their known elevation, and if you pass through/near those the Garmin will calibrate its barometer. Setting one outside your house is a really good idea!
Irrelevant. Climbing from 0 to 500 is the same as 200 to 700 if you didn't calibrate altimeter at beginning.
Not if the weather/pressure changes as you climb, so it seems you've gone from 0 to 510. I'll concede this shouldn't cause huge amounts of error, also that maybe Torro Torro had something else in mind.
The other problem I've had with Garmin 500 is erratic / jumpy altitude readings, which I suspect may be due to water (sweat or rain) getting into / covering the altimeter ports and blocking them temporarily.
Irrelevant. Climbing from 0 to 500 is the same as 200 to 700 if you didn't calibrate altimeter at beginning.
There was also a world record broken in Essex the other day, where 2 guys got the record for the most metres climbed in 12 hours (and did it for a haemophilia charity). You might think that Essex would not be the obvious place for that! Indeed, perhaps because it was Essex, there was no need for the media to shout about it.
One of the guys, Steve Collins, "claimed the [Wiggins hour record] ride was illegal due to the equipment Wiggins used and questioned the role of British Cycling".
"I approve of this as long as there was no whooping."
Do bears poo in the woods!
Whoooooo hoooo ! Bear pooh ? Hell yeah !!
Is this true ?
"and anything less than 9 or 10% would've meant using energy against wind resistance vs energy for climbing the hill."
Is this really true ?
Not really, but wind resistance is proportional to the square of the speed, so doubling the speed quadruples the wind resistance - so the slower he goes the better in that regard
..and the power required to overcome the drag therefore goes like the cube of the velocity - so slow is good in that regard.
That would be great if the way that Strava calculated elevation gain wasn't a complete joke. It's all the more galling when you have a device that measures elevation reasonably accurately and Strava decides to completely disregard that data and do it's own thing.
In my experience, 28,789 vs 29,146 metres is a completely insignificant difference. It's a 1.2% increase, whereas the margin of error for Strava Elevation gain could be anywhere from 5-50% depending on GPS conditions and terrain.
No doubt an impressive ride, it's just a shame that he chose to publicise a service that wilfully show such disregard for data accuracy and not just in this respect.
So how do you think elevation gain should be calculated? Can you give an algorithm?
Note that this question is related to "how long is the coast of Britain", in that the resolution of the measurement significantly affects the answer, and there needn't be any "true" answer to the question.
I approve of this as long as there was no whooping.
Insanity has just been taken to a whole new level.