Mt. Scott VS The hills east of Oklahoma City

I've been wanting to try a little experiment to see how beneficial it is to drive south to the Mt. Scott - Medicine Park area compared to riding from my house and hitting the hills east of town. I guess I wanted to see if it was worth the extra drive time in addition to ride time or a 5-6 hour total time day to Mt.Scott VS a 5-6 hour ride from my house. I got a Powertap Joule about a month ago, and so far, the altimeter feature has been pretty interesting. Anyway, I collected some data from last weekend at Mt.Scott and some more riding out east yesterday and today.

It's funny how small Mt.Scott looks from the parking lot until you see a car going up.

Basic data from Mt.Scott 12/31/11

 I have to admit I wanted the ride at Mt.Scott to count. The elevation screen on my Joule was definitely a motivator to keep climbing. Judson and I climbed the big rock climb 4 times and Mt.Scott 4 times. I honestly don't think I could have done much more this day. About a 6.5 hour investment total for the day. The actuall ride time was about 3 hours and 45 minutes.

Solo ride out to Jones hitting as many hills as possible.

 Yesterday was kind of an elevation experiment. I didn't ride super hard or spend a lot of time over my threshold. I wanted to do the hilliest ride I could do to see if it could come close to matching Mt.Scott's feet of climbing.
It didn't. The best I could come up with was just a little over 1000 ft. of climbing per hour, where Mt.Scott is close to 2000 ft. of climbing per hour. It could actually be more if you just stuck to doing repeats on Mt.Scott. The solo ride was the most steady of the 3, and had a higher average power as well, but the normalized power and overall training stress was lower. I tried to save my legs a little because I knew the next day would be harder. A little over 4 hours invested to bike riding for the day.

Team ride to Jones/Luther today

 The ride with the team today definitely had some more intensity and a little more of a variable ride, We didn't climb as much but the overall normalized power and training stress were almost identical to the trip to Mt.Scott last weekend.
So which one is better? Well, I guess if you live in a world of unlimited training time on the weekends, Mt.Scott would be the better choice. You can do more types of riding and climb as much as you can stomach as well. If your ride time is limited, riding out to Jones is a good choice. It actually could be better if you wanted to get the maximum amount of training stress in 5 hours or less.

I think the best option is a mix of the two. Way more fun that way as well, especially when you've got some awesome team mates to ride/travel with.

I think the hardest part of the ride today was wrestling my recovery drink away from my daughter Josie!