I've frequently been asked the question "How long should it take me to climb X"? Of course I can't give a useful answer without having a pretty good idea of the fitness and skill level of the person asking the question. Guidebooks and park hiking guides typically give very conservative, pretty slow estimates.

I had a thought about using a calibration versus the records on the fastest known times site. http://fastestknowntime.proboards.com/

As an example, say a person took 10 hours to climb or hike a given ten mile route. The FKT on that route is 6 hours. Their pace is 1 mph. The FKT pace is 1.66 mph. Their pace is then 60% that of a record. They then want to predict how long it will take them to to do a different 15 mile route where the FKT is 4 hours. The FKT pace is 3.75 mph. Multiply by 60% = 2.25 mph. 15 miles/2.25 mph = 6.7 hours. Of course the actual outcome can be heavily influenced by weather / conditions. But at least it's a means to make a reasonable quantifiable estimate. Of course if there is no record posted it isn't of much value.

This type of approach was adopted a long time ago to produce Master's Age Graded tables for competitive running. Basically scaling everything to a percent of world record pace for a given age and gender.

What do you think? Is this useful? Potential pitfalls?

I usually estimate my time against the average time if one is provided. Keep in mind that average times and FKTs are only published for very popular trails/routes. And it takes both time and experience to understand how you compare against the baselines.

For the 99% of trails and routes that don't have baselines, I've gotten pretty good at estimating travel time based on a number of factors; altitude, pack weight, terrain/trail condition, up-hill vs downhill, etc. Once again, accuracy comes with time and experience.

Estimating time is useful but it's even more important to simply understand what you can and can't do in a day. Whether it takes 8 hours or 12 hours doesn't matter nearly so much as determining, can you make it or not, in a day. It's great to reach the summit but you need to leave enough in the tank to make it back safely.

Interesting - I see the age tables have separate calculations for, say, hurdles vs sprints, and they even include javelin and shot put.

You'd need to do something similar for routes - hike vs climb, rock vs ice, etc. This gets tricky as many routes have sections in each category, or are hard to classify, but you could break the route into sections and/or interpolate from the more relevant categories.

You of course have to also know the maximum difficulty on the route. If you can't climb it, the FKT doesn't matter.

For ordinary hiking I use the AMC concept called "book time" as a baseline: half an hour per mile, plus half an hour per 1000 feet of elevation gain. From experience I can predict how much better (or worse!) I'll do based on my level of fitness, my pack weight, weather and snow conditions, altitude, and whether I plan to stop for photos.

Final thought: in many cases the FKT is based on a very low number of attempts, so compared to, say, the 100m or a marathon, it's often got a lot more room for improvement than a typical "world record", and a lot more variability. Two fairly similar routes may have significantly different FKTs by sheer luck. You're picking a statistically "noisy" measure for your baseline, which will make it harder to get usefully precise results.

Predicted duration would be a nice feature that sites like SummitPost could incorporate if they collected the right data on routes and from user trip logs. Take a number of standard factors such as distance, elevation, difficulty (e.g. number, grade, and type of climbing pitches), time of year, and some more specific factors like your previously recorded time on other routes, other users recorded times on the route, and your similarity to other users based on times from other routes. Throw those factors into a machine learning algorithm and I'll bet you'd get decent prediction accuracy.

That's probably more complicated than you'd want to get into, but predictive modelling is being applied everywhere these days. It's not unthinkable that a site like SummitPost or MountainProject could include a feature like this in the not too distant future.

I've started putting together a personal database to record trips, and I was eventually going to make a handful of data visualizations. Predicting route time would be a fun idea to work on as well.

Thanks for the discussion guys. I think Alpinist makes the most important point: Whether the individual can reasonably assume he can safely finish in one day, or winds up inadvertently spending the night without camping gear.

Excellent discussion. Another variable to consider iif using a Summitpost generated algorithm is pack weight. I know some ultrarunners who could smoke a FKT on some trails, but end up lagging behind the average if having to haul 60lbs over a pass. Altitude as well. The biggest pitfall though would be liars. I have a feeling there would be morons who sign up and end up getting their jollies by entering bad data. I think it would be a good idea to give access to that area only to people who are well known contributors or people that those contributors could vouch for. I think it would be an awesome tool. You could narrow down the data to people in your age, pack weight, weather, group size for your intended Peak. The info right now is just subjective to the person who owns the page. Like the guy who originally owned the Bighorn Peak page for the Bighorn Range. He stated you would want 2-3 days for that round trip. That may be true for him, but many on Summitpost could do it in a day.....it's only 17 miles round trip. People looking at the page who don't have much experience could miss out on a beautiful climb, even though they may have the fitness to do it.

People looking at the page who don't have much experience could miss out on a beautiful climb, even though they may have the fitness to do it.

I can't imagine ever planning a trip solely on a published average time or FKT. Published times are nice to have but I think most people will look at a topo map and do their own assessment of the difficulty/duration before venturing out. I would never scrap a trip because of someone else's estimated time duration.

Time is not important. Live is!

For the last several years I’ve not been even taking a watch. I check time on my phone while leaving the TH, summiting, and getting back to the TH. During my ascend I focus on safety, enjoyment, taking pictures and videos, and monitoring my (and my teammates if not climbing solo) physical and mental capabilities. As long as I make the summit, I’m happy (sometimes very happy). Mountaineering is suffering anyway; why to suffer more.

As an example, over the last few years I’ve climbed (or hiked) Clear Creek route, Mt Shasta (14,179ft or 4,322m with elevation gain more than 50%), xx times with the shortest time less than 7 hours (far from the record) and the longest 12 hours just to the top (up to 18 hours round trip). Sometimes I do this twice c2c with various time results. I gave up the summit only once for the safety of my teammates (not due to my incapability). However, sometimes I feel the altitude on the top, other times I’m full of energy. (The descant is usually mental pain.)

I completely agree with Alpinist:

Alpinist wrote:. . .Estimating time is useful but it's even more important to simply understand what you can and can't do in a day. Whether it takes 8 hours or 12 hours doesn't matter nearly so much as determining, can you make it or not, in a day. It's great to reach the summit but you need to leave enough in the tank to make it back safely.

So once again: time is not important, live is. However, everything is subjective and based upon a person’s perception, goals and capabilities (and in high altitude many other factors). A one-time-live achievement is not that important as the sustainability (Can you repeat it over and over and over...?). You only feel the adventure while living it; the rest is illusion. Climb Safe and enjoy your live!

Alpinist wrote:

People looking at the page who don't have much experience could miss out on a beautiful climb, even though they may have the fitness to do it.

I can't imagine ever planning a trip solely on a published average time or FKT. Published times are nice to have but I think most people will look at a topo map and do their own assessment of the difficulty/duration before venturing out. I would never scrap a trip because of someone else's estimated time duration.

Neither would I, but I've run into more and more new climbers who are planning trips around SP trip reports as 90% of their beta. Scary but true. Planning and logistics seem to be thrown aside anymore, as well as learning procedure, protocol, map reading, etc. Sad but true.