jtupper
I calculated the effects of both up and down-hills on Boston course, quite a few years ago and it was published in a little handout that went with the race packets. I have a copy of that somewhere. I also have formulas that make both up and downhill conversions in some programmable calculator somewhere around here. Seems that each % up hill slows you about 15 sec per mile and each % down gives you about 8 seconds per mile benefit, provided that you maintain the same energy expenditure. Another calculation I had showed about 12 sec per mile lost per % up. I've been tryng to get some runners to do another study on this. It isn't hard to do -- just run some repeated 5-min runs at different grades and calculate how big an increase you get in VO2 with each % grade. When we did this before I remember that different people respond differently -- some handle hills better than others (who may handle speed increases better than the hill people). A problem is that the up grade increases the cost so much that it is hard to run very fast, because the VO2 will go above max real quickly. So yu end up extrapolating from slower speeds and hope it applies at faster ones. I have done faster ones using Rate of Perceived Exertion and that can be done beyond max, but not ver exact