UKC

For running training and getting in the ascent each week - it would be useful for me to know where I could gain the most height in the shortest distance. 

So far all I can think of is:

1) where I know the highest hills are near me (but they aren't necessarily the steepest so aren't great for getting in ascent whilst keeping weekly distance in line with plan)

2) looking at a colour coded elevation map to find the biggest hills, but again doesn't necessarily correlate to "steep/short" hills.

3) plotting routes up hills and checking the % grade 

Is there something else? What I really need is something like a colour coded graph showing the "gradient" rather than the elevation. Then you could look for hotspots and go to those...?

I thought I could also download my entire strava run history and then just do a simple calculation to see which had the most ascent in shortest distance and just repeat that run, but it's not ideal.

In reply to elliot.baker:

Look at a map and note where the contour lines are closest?

In reply to elliot.baker:

If you go on Strava and into the segment explorer you can filter by Flat, Hilly or Steep. The steep filter doesn't return any results where I live but the Hilly filter brings back my local climbs, the segment length and the % gradient.

In reply to elliot.baker:

Try the Huli app? It allows you to enter distance and elevation gain, though I guess that doesn't necessarily find the steepest/most continuous individual hills.

Or open an OS map (available on Bing), unfocus your eyes and look for the brownest areas.

In reply to elliot.baker:

A number of mapping tools will colour code an entered route according to slope. OruxMaps will do that. My colleague's 'WheresThePath' web app will do that, too. Many tools will also show you the route profile.

A good GIS will calculate gradient, and display it as a colour map. I'm pretty sure the old tool LandSerf would do that; it certainly had the ability to analyse terrain for gulleys and ridges.

In reply to elliot.baker:

If you want to do it properly, you can access the openDEM data sets (Digital Elevation Data). They even provide some guidance on how to process the data to extract (for example) the slope of highways as defined by the OSM (OpenStreetMap) data: https://www.opendem.info/pdf/SRTM_DTM_PROCESSING_OpenDEM.pdf

How hard can it be?

In reply to Dan Bailey - UKHillwalking.com:

That would seem to be the simplest way!

In reply to OP:

I don't think it's as simple as just finding your steepest hill and running up it. Above a certain gradient it will be unrunnable (to most runners) and it will be slow going.

You could probably do more ascent in a given time span running a more moderate gradient than slogging up a hill at walking speed with hands on thighs.

I understand you want to limit mileage, but I think you're more likely to injure yourself flogging yourself up the steepest hill in the shortest distance than doing an extra half mile or mile at a more moderate gradient to gain the same elevation.

In reply to elliot.baker:

You can also use this tool to punch numbers in and find some Strava segments based on distance/elevation gain/grade. 
https://www.doogal.co.uk/strava.php

In reply to elliot.baker:

You're overthinking - think about all your local hills and try reps of one. If it's too steep/long/short/far away, try another

In reply to elliot.baker:

If your local hill is not steep enough or long enough, you can always do more reps and / or at a faster pace.

In reply to elliot.baker:

I too think you are overthinking this.  Lets imagine you find the 'perfect hill'.  But then discover its a road which is busy.  Do you really want to spend time running alongside traffic.

Just look at a map.  Find a hill or hills you enjoy running up and keep visiting hills and keep running.  Length, steepness, elevation don't come in neat bundles.  Running up anything steep will get you fit.

An as another poster pointed out.  The 'steepest', hill, you may end up walking up lots of it which won't help you.

In reply to elliot.baker:

I'm another one who thinks your overthinking things. When I was training for the Lairig Ghru race last year, I did make a point of choosing hard long hilly runs, but not to the extent of analysing gradients - it was more a question of picking routes which were just about at the limit of my capabilities, and accepting that I'd probably walk some of the steeper bits. Bear in mind that there aren't many places with a constant gradient over a significant distance.
It's all a great excuse for finding new places to run and testing yourself. Don't get bogged down in the minutiae - that'll just take the fun away.

In reply to Ridge:

Again, it depends on what you are trying to achieve. Training intervals up 10% slope on tarmac is not optimal training for getting up Pen-yr-Ole-Wen fast (to link back to the Welsh 3k thread). If you have a specific goal then you should train specifically for that. If not, then you're best mixing up the slopes and terrain - some too steep to run, some gentle, some tarmac some rough stuff, long intervals (10mins+), some short (30s). You are less likely to get bored or worse still injured by overdoing one thing.

In reply to Ridge:

Sometimes that's the point. Borrowdale fell race has 3 rough climbs over 25% and over 1,000' ascent. A few sessions on smaller hills to simulate going up and (critically) down that type of terrain is important - specificity and all that. It looks like this guy is doing the Welsh 3000's so while maybe not a regular thing a few sessions on the roughest, steepest stuff around would be of value.

In reply to elliot.baker:

I think you said you’re near Belper. There are some horrible inclines around Starkholmes, Riber, or up the side of the Via Gelia. There’s the start of the High Peak Trail too, which Is actually runnable so maybe not what you’re after.

In reply to Ridge:

<thread digression> I know that runners do put their hands on their thighs when walking up a steep hill. I do too. It seems to make it easier. But I can't work out the sense of this. One of the two big efforts in each step on going up such a hill is in trying to straighten up the leg, the other one being moving the foot of said leg up a notch in the first place. Why would pressing down on the leg make it easier to straighten it? Surely the opposite?

In reply to dread-i:

Or if you have no hills at all, a trailer tyre + bit of blue rope +  a belt is a hill substitute, not as good... but better than not.

In reply to Thugitty Jugitty:

I used to work in Matlock and our IT dept* used to do hill repeats up the high peak trail from Cromford to Black Rocks. It seemed to do the trick for him!

*Phil Winskill

In reply to mbh:

The equal and opposite reaction of your thigh on your hand effectively cancels out the force on the part of your body above the knee (and the moment about the knee), so it shouldn't make any difference whether you press down on your thigh or not. 

Actually, if you are pressing down on your knee rather than thigh, it will have a benefit. The equal and opposite reaction will help lift your body but you are only pressing down on your static lower leg and not generating a moment about the knee. I suspect this is what people actually do.

You can try getting up from a chair. Hands on knees help. Hands on thighs do not.

In reply to Robert Durran:

Indeed. Makes sense and conforms with impromptu trial. Thanks.

In reply to elliot.baker:

I know (in classic UKC fashion) that I'm not answering your question, but I have spent quite a bit of time over recent years doing hill reps and - for me - these are important points:

(1) How far away from home is your chosen hill?  I really want to be well warmed-up before I start the efforts and (even more importantly) I want to be able to warm-down afterwards with a gentle plod home - I really don't want to drive to/from the hill.

(2) What shape is the hill?  My favourites start shallow (to get up to speed), then steepen progressively (max effort), then shallow again (legs wobbling, lungs rasping - keep going!)

(3) Are there any interruptions?  Are there any breaks in the pavement? (assuming pavement running?

(4) Are there some specific start / end points?  Not critical, but I like to time my overall efforts in a session - to compare sessions.  You tend to become very familiar with your own limits and pacing!

Good luck!  I love the fact that you can rationalise hill-rep sessions by telling yourself that you'll only be trying hard for a few minutes in total!

In reply to Thugitty Jugitty:

There are some funny comments on this 😂

I know what contour lines are but I want something to just tell me the answer and give me a nice menu of hills of decreasing gradient rather than having to do the detective work. 🤣

I’ll check out via Gelia/ Riber / starkholmes thanks.  I actually ran through Riber for the first time the other day. 
 

I’ve also considered the path from Cromford canal to black rocks but I just don’t think it’s steep enough. 
 

I have plenty of very hilly, for Belper, routes I run, but the overall ascent and gradient in these is nothing compared to something like Welsh 3000s or what you’d find in the lakes or even Kinder. I think this means I’d need to run far far further in a week than I need to / can do in order to get the ascent in. 
 

Thanks for all the responses and I’m definitely over thinking it but it’s fun to have a goal. 

In reply to elliot.baker:

I live near Riber and there are plenty of hills to go at! Look at the Riber Fell fell run route for example. When training for hills, I did repeats on the steep path which starts in Starkholmes next to Highfields school and goes straight up to Riber castle.  

In reply to elliot.baker:

OK, this has been niggling me - partly 'cos I was interested in dabbling with GIS - so I've figured out how to create an OSM map with (for instance) footpaths and bridleways highlighted and colour-coded by slope. See...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-f2Usw2F2hfYHQt2omSLp0whyZHdUohZ/view?usp=...

... for an example in my own back-yard (Macclesfield Forest). Blue is essentially flat through to red which is definitely walk (uphill) or plummet (downhill).

If it's useful I can post instruction on how to do it, or - at a push - create one for around Belper.

In reply to elliot.baker:

I've never done the training thing.Just a thought. Pretty boring but a tall office block etc might provide an ascent up umpteen flights of stairs, then save knees with lift back down, repeat as required (rugby team at hospital where I worked did this.

In reply to elliot.baker:

FATMAP will help you here. 

In reply to elliot.baker:

It is hard to beat simply getting out and doing some exploratory runs around your local area with  a map in  hand.

In reply to elliot.baker:

I sometimes wonder what if any long-term physiological differences there are with regular walkers and runners who have steep hills close to where they live and which thus become the norm. I'm part of the UKC contingent that lives in/around Stirling and has the southern Hillfoots side of the Ochils on tap, and pretty much every outing there starts either steep or very steep, particularly to 250m (from a base of about 50m) and often up to 450m, after which it tends to bank off. That's so much the norm for me that I've come to find any walk with a long gentle intro quite frustrating - I'm wanting to be 300m up in the first half-hour out of habit. Similarly with downhills - it must have an effect over the years and the accumulated visits, although there are some easier downhill options and I'm generally a steep up, gentle down kind of guy. The same must apply to people who live below the steep side of the Howgills, for instance - or in Kinlochleven etc. It would be interesting to see how walkers and runners differed if they were based in say Braemar as opposed to Ballachulish.

In reply to Dave Hewitt:

From observation, Robbie Simpson (of Deeside Runners) is equally at home regardless of terrain and gradient up or down.

In reply to Dave Hewitt:

I live in an area in the South Pennines famed for steep MTB sections but generally plan running routes to avoid steep up/down intros until I've warmed up! I do find myself comparing others areas' steep slopes to 'mine' though but I think their relative shortness (usually sub 100m) limits how much of a norm they become 

In reply to Bulls Crack:

The "norm" thing is interesting - eg I do so many Ochil loops (generally twice a week) of between three and four hours that I seem to have become a sort of "middle-distance walker". There are still a fair few Munro days of five or six hours, especially in non-winter, but the years when I would routinely have an eight-hour Munro day every couple of weeks seem to have gone. A lot does seem to depend on what's available very locally, with subsequent knock-on effects to one's exercise habits generally - although I know hill people in Stirling who are capable of going a whole year without any visits to the Ochils.

In reply to Marek:

This is pretty much bang on exactly what I was after! I've never worked with OSM or GIS or any of that, I have no idea how to edit any of it, but I would be interested to learn if there are any reference sources you can direct me to easily. You don't have to make me one! Give a man a fish/fishing rod and all that...!

In reply to elliot.baker:

Agreed! So, here is a rough outline of what I did/learned...

1. Download & install QGIS (free GIS software, 1GB approx.)

2. In Plugin Manager, install QuickOSM (OSM database access)and qProf (profile extractor).

3. Get a DEM (Digital Elevation Model) for your area-of-interest. I used the USGS EarthExplorer to get SRTM data. There other sources like OpenDEM.org. I also suspect the OSM base map contains the data, but I didn't try using that.

4. In QGIS, load an OSM base map (XYZ tiles) and zoom in to your area.

5. Load the DEM as a layer (use the Data Source Manager)

6. Use the QuickOSM plugin to fetch the path/tracks/etc from the OSM server. The OSM wiki will help with highway types.

7. To get a sensible definition of 'slope' you need to reproject the path lines from the global CRS (coords in degrees) into the OSGB CRS (coords in meters). Do this by Saving the path line layer to a new layer with the CRS changed to EPSG:27700.

8. Use the qProf plugin to extract the profiles of the reprojected path line layer from the DEM layer. Output the results to a shapefile - line layer.

9. Open the Properties of this new layer and edit the 'symbology' (i.e., rendering style), graduated color ramp based on abs("slopd_1"). Choose mode and classification to suit your visualisation requirements.

Done!

The above misses out a lot of details. If you need more help let me know.

Links I found useful...

https://docs.qgis.org/2.14/en/docs/training_manual/

https://www.qgistutorials.com/en/docs/3/downloading_osm_data.html

https://www.geodose.com/2018/09/how-to-create-dem-elevation-profile-qgis.ht...

https://privatemajory.github.io/gis/2019/05/20/deriving-road-steepness-from...

Good luck and hope the fishing goes well!

In reply to elliot.baker:

I often use this site to work out where the steepest gradients are.

https://osmaps.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/

Go to Routes then Create Route. Zoom into the area you are interested in. Then simply plot a start point and end point on the map.  Then take a look at the distance and elevation gain.

In reply to Dave Hewitt:  The big problem in my experience that people who live near hills have is that they get used to running up and down at moderate pace and find it hard to 'get going' in race situations.  It can be a p.i.t.a. for recovery runs - if you look at the places popular for altitude training they're usually plateaus, or comparatively flat.

Some good stuff on calculating slope in a GIS, I would expect to find a way to do it in a GIS by googling 'calculating dip and strike', or particularly dip intensity , though I normally do it outside a GIS

In reply to elliot.baker:

I live in Lincolnshire and despite its reputation, we do have plenty of steep hills; our problem is that the steep bits aren't very long! The best I can do in training is to do several reps, which at least gives a degree of interval training and also helps the muscles you need when descending.

In reply to elliot.baker:

Years ago I was sent on a photographic assignment to the Everest region by a trekking company and for some reason that I can't now remember I was unable to get to the mountains (i.e. N Wales and Lakes) for training/to get fit in the short time I had available, so I used some of the local dales in the Peak District (I, like you, live in Belper). The idea I had, which actually worked out extremely well, was to charge up and down the sides of some of the deepest dales in a diagonal zig-zag line, each ascent and descent I think being at least 4 or 5 hundred feet. It's hard to remember which worked out to be the best now, because I did the same thing in Lathkill Dale, Cressbrook Dale and Monsal Dale, but I think Lathkill Dale was the best ... I can't remember, but you could do about 5 or 6 diagonal ascents and descents (I mean about 5 up and 5 down, about 10 in all), so you clocked up several thousand feet, all very steep in little over an hour. One very vivid memory I have was charging diagonally up and down the north and west sides of Fin Cop in Monsal Dale, and that was an absolutely intense 'killer', hundreds of feet, very steep, verging on the dangerous. I was deliberately doing this with quite a heavy sack on my back, and it worked out very well. By doing this you could almost imitate something as gruelling as going up Pen Yr Ol Wen from Ogwen Cottage in a very short space of time. I suspect this was breaking lots of National Park rules, but I was doing it very secretly, on my own, and I think almost nobody saw me doing it.

In reply to Marek:

You can also get the data straight from OS, a GIS software for free (QGIS) and almost certainly find an guide online of how to do this. It’s 1st year geography undergrad level, so really not too hard.

Or you can pay for FATMAP which has gradient coloured maps.