Into the wind

Over on Yantsied (also spelled Jantsied at the Plautdietsch Dictionary) the MIT's BigJac calls it the "Riding the Manitoba Mountain". That's a positive way of thinking about it. The question is, how does riding into the wind compare to riding up a mountain, say like the Galibier, or Alpe d'Huez, or Ventoux?

Well, it turns out that some German site has developed an online calculator to answer just this question. Today I rode from home to Emerson, then to Dominion City, then to Letellier, then back home (just under 80 ks). The wind was 30 ks gusting to 50 ks (I'll say it was an average of 35 ks) from the southeast, which means I road more or less into the wind from home to Emerson (23 ks), and then from Letellier to the 421 (7 ks) into some sort of wind. Over the entire ride I averaged 29 k/h. Into the wind I averaged about 24 k/h, which means, according to this calculator, my wattage output was 547 - which seems like a lot!

If I compare this to riding up Mt. Ventoux (which I did in April of 2011), a 22.7 k ride over which I averaged 13 k/h, my wattage was 233. IF I could hold a 24 k/h average up Ventoux, the wattage would be 484 (which means I wasn't working hard enough when I was climbing). So if this is to be believed, riding into a 35 k/h wind is physically harder than riding up a 23 k, 7% grade hill. (Of course Ventoux has stretches where the grade is less and more than 7% (up to 11%).)

It makes sense to me that riding into the wind is more taxing mentally, because it's relentless, and the reward the wind gives is more fickle than flying down a hill. But I'm more skeptical that it takes about half of the energy to climb, than to ride into a wind.