ft per hour

[quaternion]

I have always calculated my initial time estimates using the rule: (1 hour per 3 miles) plus (1 hour per 2000' of elevation gain). On decent trail, or open class 2 terrain, I handily beat the time estimate (although less handily with each passing year). Any number of things can cause the actual time to be longer, or much longer: thick deadfall, postholing in snow, a heavy (overnight) pack, significant time above some threshold elevation (~12,500' for me), boulder hopping, technical terrain. Then the estimate from that rule is my no-less-than time estimate. It is useful to make the estimate for a number of hikes, and then check your actual times against the estimate. Then you get a feel for how the rule applies to you - low, high, about right. I can't offer anything better for specific complicating factors...

[mtree]

As for me, I have only looked at my feet per hour once in a while so I don't have a good grasp on it. When somewhat acclimatized I can get close to 2 mph more or less on a class 1 or 2, but when I first arrive in Colorado I pretty much average 1.5 to 1.6 mph for a round trip hike. Easy class 3 isn't much different but when I am in steeper class 3 I slow down to check hand and footholds. I am too old and feel like I have too much to lose to not be conservative in my approach. I did the east gully of crestone needle for the first time last year and was quite slow on the steep sections though I felt comfortable with the exposure throughout. So I definitely get slower the higher the class of the climb. I have very little experience in snow. I did hike Quandary and the Decalibron after a snowstorm in early September of 2020 but a good trench was already in place. I was very new to the 14ers then and didn't pay any attention to my speed.

I don't care about mph because you can RUN on flat surfaces or just stroll along. Its more about the elevation gain per hour in decent weather and no snow/ice. And I like to measure it on a sustained pitch like Bierstadt after Scott Gomer creek, Huron, or similar peaks with long sustained elevation gain. I feel this gives a good indication of your elevation speed in feet/hour. Most "normal" hikers will naturally slow down as the pitch increases, but you'll also be increasing your elevation gain accordingly. Only class 1 or 2 (maybe easy class 3) will work because you avoid route finding, technique, and decision making.

Winter conditions vary too much to get an average. But knowing your ft/hour is a great way to time how long you expect to reach a summit. If there's long stretches of flat areas you can estimate those by your average mph. I figure I can cover 2.5 miles per hour without extra effort. This was important to me when I want to avoid afternoon thunderstorms. Or what time I need to be on the trail. When you're up uber early and driving for hours to a peak that extra 30 minutes of sleep can be crucial to your attitude!

I once thought I can use it to match up hiking buddies, but that was a dismal failure because they usually had no clue.

[supranihilest]

I don't know my feet per hour, knots per annum, VO2 bell curve algorithm, any of that junk. They're all useless stats unless you're a pro athlete training for a specific event and vary so widely over terrain types, weather conditions, and even daily feelings as to be utterly irrelevant. How did this thread get to be 80+ replies? Every single one of them says the same yet different thing i.e. nothing.

[Ed_Groves]

I don't know my feet per hour, knots per annum, VO2 bell curve algorithm, any of that junk. They're all useless stats unless you're a pro athlete training for a specific event and vary so widely over terrain types, weather conditions, and even daily feelings as to be utterly irrelevant. How did this thread get to be 80+ replies? Every single one of them says the same yet different thing i.e. nothing.

I get your point. Unless someone is competing, these things aren't as important. But having an idea of an approximate range of time that it will take you to reach a particular summit is something we all use at some point if we are trying to beat storms coming in later in the day. As noted by you and others, the estimate does change based on the characteristics and conditions of the route. Yet many of us still make an estimate so we start early enough to avoid afternoon storms.

[justiner]

EDIT: Furthermore, it is not true that steeper=slower climbing speed. There is a sweet spot.

They did a study and actually found that the steeper the climb the more efficient it is to climb, until 20 or 30 degrees (which is steep!)

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/tr ... -up-hills/

[cedica]

EDIT: Furthermore, it is not true that steeper=slower climbing speed. There is a sweet spot.

They did a study and actually found that the steeper the climb the more efficient it is to climb, until 20 or 30 degrees (which is steep!)

https://www.outsideonline.com/health/tr ... -up-hills/

Wait, no, those results are so deceptive. The study was based on the fixed rate of climb:

"They tested runners at a variety of slopes, with the treadmill speed adjusted so that they were always gaining elevation at the same rate, equivalent to a vertical kilometer in a very respectable time of 48 minutes (the world record is just under 30 minutes)."

"At gentle slopes like 10 degrees, it takes a lot of energy to climb, because the treadmill is moving really fast to gain the required elevation."

"The Takeaway: The most important caveat to keep in mind when interpreting these results is that the comparisons are based on a fixed climbing rate. "

[Bale]

I got to a point where I could knock on the door of 3k ft/hr in my heyday, and my male genitalia is also average.
Anyhoo, I too have often wondered what the perfect angle is regarding max vertical gain for a given effort. Anyone got anything better than that O article? I feel like it’s probably somewhere in the 1000 ft/ mile range, right?

[justiner]

Testing speed is less helpful in research setting, as then you're just testing fitness - but it's not a race itself. Efficiency would correspond to faster speeds over time, as human powered speed over a distance of more than... I dunno ~400 meters -- is all about being as efficient as possible -- another word for that is stamina.

As a dumb example, if you can climb a pitch @ 30 degrees to 500' at 60% maximum HR, but do the same pitch at the time time @ 10 degrees at 65% maximum HR, the former will be more efficient and you'll recover faster

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this would be at Barr Trail to the Incline, which allows you to even get to the same spot by two very different pitches. I find that the idea of using the incline to go up as more efficient as honestly: counter-intuitive.

This information now does sort of flavor my thinking when it comes to Nolan's 14: turns out you can probably do the best you can do, taking on steepest options. If they're more efficient, it means more in the tank for later and one of the ways people cut off a Nolan's 14 run is just exhaustion.

The video from the older research study is pretty fun,

[cedica]

(...)
As a dumb example, if you can climb a pitch @ 30 degrees to 500' at 60% maximum HR, but do the same pitch at the time time @ 10 degrees at 65% maximum HR, the former will be more efficient and you'll recover faster
(...)

I believe this is something we can all agree on. Call it "given effort" or "% of maximum HR" or "W/kg", we are all talking about (the same?) parameter which we want to keep constant during one phase of the experiment. It is true that metabolic parameters such as these might be difficult to measure outside the lab, unless one happens to be on the power meter equipped bike, but this is what we actually work hard to improve on, and it will eventually optimize our efficiency.

But why constant time? At the beginning of experiment you are not standing in front of the slope thinking "I'm gonna scale this mother in exactly N minutes using M% of my max HR to see how I'll feel after". That is not a real world scenario, because ahead of time you can't know how far on the slope you will end up. Same goes for the article cited above, results are useful only if all of your outings are exactly 48 minutes long and 3281 feet tall.

At the end of the day (or race, or a single slope) we brag about the climbing rate because it's easy to calculate (elevation gain divided by time), but that's just a byproduct, not something that we were really able to control. "Effort" or "HR" or "wattage" is what we were trying to control in order to avoid collapsing before the finish line, and for this reason I don't believe that constant rate of climb applies to the real world. My thinking is that it would be much more insightful to plot family of curves with elevation gain result on the vertical axis vs. pitch angle on the horizontal, using fixed effort (W/kg) for each curve. That would go a long way toward answering the questions posed by this thread. And I realize that it might be difficult to measure elevation gain on the treadmill in the lab, but that's the whole point - studying complex processes in the physical world is never easy.

[SchralpTheGnar]

My favorite scene of rocky iv is when drago is doing all the high tech training and rocky is doing the low tech equivalent

[terrysrunning]

I think it’s super useful to know how fast you climb. For the past few dozen peaks I’ve climbed, I’ve known within minutes how long it would take me, and that’s very valuable in deciding what time to start or whether you can make a weather window.
When I hear someone ask or talk about how many miles a certain route is, or how long it should take to hike X miles, I assume they don’t know anything, because the miles are generally the least important part of the calculus. The exception is when you have a route like Capitol, where you have significant amounts of flat sections you have to account for. Crossing the boulder field on Pyramid below the Thousand Feet of Suck (which really doesn’t suck that much) takes some time and you’re not gaining much elevation there. So you need to add time for stuff like that, whatever your flat pace is. But pretty much all hikes have at least a little of that, so you can roll that into your calcs. But when the climbing is the defining part of the hike, once gain hits 300’ per mile or so, you can mostly ignore the miles and look at the gain. I know I’m climbing a thousand feet every 50 minutes or so; so 5 minutes per 100 ft. It’ll be well under 5 closer to the trailhead, and 6ish closer to the summit, but if I figure 5 minutes per 100 ft up, and 60% of that down, I can generally tell you within 10 minutes how long the outing will take. The gradient doesn’t change it much. Whether that thousand feet is over 2 miles or 3/4 of a mile, still going to take me 50 minutes. And for me, class 3-4 doesn’t even affect it. I’m a solid scrambler and you’re gaining feet pretty steeply on that stuff, so my gain per minute doesn’t change much. If you know you need to slow down a little more for that stuff, easy to figure that.
It’s pretty nice when I’m looking at clouds coming in, and I can see that I’ve got another 500 ft to the summit, but I know that’s going to take me 30 minutes, so I can make an educated decision. If you think you hike 2 miles per hour, but you don’t account for the fact that last mile has 1,200’ of gain, you’re gonna have a bad time.
There are notable exceptions when you have to trust your experience or the numbers don’t work. Teakettle was the most garbage ascent ever and the descent was worse so I was over an hour off my normal pace. Nothing’s perfect.
And FTR, at my 50 minutes per thousand foot pace, I kept a rough count the last year I did a bunch of 14ers (focused on Centennials now) and I passed over 100 people on my hikes and got passed myself fewer than 5 times. My friends, who are mostly trail runners, are all faster than me and generally hit 2k/hr or more, but that’s way faster than the average on the trail. Based on my observations, average is likely a thousand feet per hour or even a little less. If you’re doing a thousand feet an hour, you’re a pretty solid hiker.

[HikerGuy]

I don't know my feet per hour, knots per annum, VO2 bell curve algorithm, any of that junk. They're all useless stats unless you're a pro athlete training for a specific event and vary so widely over terrain types, weather conditions, and even daily feelings as to be utterly irrelevant. How did this thread get to be 80+ replies? Every single one of them says the same yet different thing i.e. nothing.

I'm with Ben, way too much variation in terrain, etc. to make this stat (ft/hr) useful. And mileage is just as important as elevation gain when estimating time for a hike.

I have used my historical hike data to come up with a formula using mileage and elevation gain to estimate duration. It's pretty darn accurate (for me). I can add modifiers for things like good trail, easy tundra, short hike, tons of talus, long ridge runs, bushwhacking, snow climbs, technical climbs, etc.