How much climbing is on ALC9?

The quick answer: about 22,270 feet. It shouldn't be a shock to you (especially this close to the event) that there's a lot of climbing between San Francisco and Los Angeles. How much? Using my best guess as to the actual ALC9 route, here is approximately how much climbing you'll do on each day of the ride, as well as my super-special "difficulty index" (more about that in a minute):

	Climbing	Difficulty index
Day 1: SF to Santa Cruz	4,290	54
Day 2: Santa Cruz to King City	2,670	25
Day 3: King City to Paso Robles	2,370	36
Day 4: Paso Robles to Santa Maria	4,000	41
Day 5: Santa Maria to Lompoc	3,000	44
Day 6: Lompoc to Ventura	3,540	41
Day 7: Ventura to LA	2,400	39

OK, take a deep breath.

What's this "difficulty index"? Simply put, it's how many feet of climbing per mile you'll do, averaged over an entire day. It doesn't account for steepness of climbs or endurance, but it's a good, gross, high-level measure of how difficult many riders find each day, assuming that you already have the basic skills to ride long distances at roughly a consistent pace. By comparison, I find any ride with an index over 100 to be quite difficult indeed ... and none of the days of ALC even come close.

How is the climbing calculated? I used Bikely, which is the same tool that reports climbing for the Mountain View and Sunnyvale training rides. MapMyRide usually reports a little less than these numbers, and most Garmin devices seem to report a little more.

For those of you who did my Mountain View rides, here is the difficulty index for those rides:
Ride 1: 43
Ride 2: 42
Ride 3: 40
Ride 4: 36
Ride 5: 32
Ride 6: 41
Ride 7: 44
Ride 8: 29
Ride 9: 26
Ride 10: 23

And this year's SF Day on the Ride was rated 63.