Diablo Double

Mt. Diablo with snow on the top.

I was a bachelor today as Kelsey went up to visit her mom and our new niece in Washington (I am heading up there tomorrow morning).  So what would any married man pretending to be a bachelor do?  You guessed it, spend a couple of hours climbing Mt. Diablo in preparation for a race next weekend.

I was kicking around the idea of doing my first ever Diablo Double earlier in the week as I knew that I would be traveling at the beginning of next week and I wouldn't have the chance to train before my first Cat. 4 race next weekend.  I decided on Friday that I needed to do a long ride as my race next weekend is 50 miles and I haven't trained on a long ride in a couple of weeks.  I committed to doing the ride and planned on taking the first ascent at a very comfortable pace and then taking the second ascent as fast as I could.

A graph of the climb.  Elevation on the left with distance on the bottom.  The gradient for each section is above the distance.

I left at 10:30AM and began my first ascent after a quick warmup on the ride over.  I took the ascent as I knew I still had a second one to follow and arrived in 1:13:22.  I felt pretty good about the first ascent considering my personal record to the top was 1:08:40.  After a 25 minute descent to the bottom I turned around and headed back up for my second ascent of the mountain.

I upped the pace from the beginning and after the first quarter I was already 2 minutes ahead of my previous pace.  My plan for the second ascent was to go as consistently fast as possible to the 3 quarter mark of the ascent and then gut it out the last quarter.  By the halfway point I was about 6 minutes ahead of my previous mark and my legs still felt pretty good considering that I was over 2 hours into this ride.  At the 3 quarter mark my legs were getting that rubber feeling and my cadence had started to slow as the gradient is pretty unrelenting at this point.

I pushed as hard as I could until the last 100 meters of the climb.  At this point the rode kicks up to 17% gradient and it really puts you in the red no matter how fast you are going.  I made it to the top in a new personal record of 1:01:01, a solid 7 minutes faster than my previous record.  Some stats from my ride:

Total time - 3 hours 48 minutes
Total calories burned - 2354
Total distance - 51.5 miles
Total ascent - 6,522 feet