How to climb when living away from mountainous areas

Many of you are thinking of tackling a Haute Route but you may be concerned that as you live in a flat area and nowhere near any climbs worth that name that you can't get the training necessary. 
So let's read some tips and specific sessions that can be helpful for people who can't ride in the mountains.

Hi Patrick,

There are sme ways to train in the mountains without the mountains. 

First of all we have home-trainer with apps like ZWIFT. You can train to climb n a smart trainer. It's really near from reality. On Zwift you have Alpe de ZWIFT which is the Alpe d'Huez and Mont Ventoux. Of course you have others like Epic Climb etc... You can do easily 2000m elevation in a ride or more if you want to !

If you want to train outside and if you are living in a flat part you can do this: big gear and big plate with face wind. As intervals you put the little plate and turn the legs at 110 T/min, between 200m and 300m long. Not perfect bu it works.

Ride safe and enjoy your training !

Alex

Hi Patrick, 

Great topic/question so I hope I can give you and other riders interested some tips!. I live in the Netherlands, aka the flat lands, and although I'm definitely not a pure climber (80kg... damn you gravity!), I can definitely hold up so here's my thoughts. For reference I've looked up a video and it had exactly the same tips so definitely take a look at that as well!

Tips:
Alexandre's tips above are great!
To add to his first tip: put your bike at an angle (books or something below front wheel), simulating a gradient. Riding on a gradient stimulates other muscles in comparison to a flat surface (or other parts of the same muscles) and these are best trained while simulating your goal. Also don't forget to put your trainer difficulty on 100%!
Alexandre's second tip, cadence intervals are indeed great and also helps you find your preferred cadence so you can adjust your rear cassette to this. Calculating may be a bit too much but is a fun exercise, and when in doubt, go bigger to be on the safe side! Luckily there's no shame anymore of spinning at a high cadence!
Something that is often overlooked (also in the video below): core! If your core is strong and you're able to put the power down efficiently when fatigued without swaying and swerving all over the road, you'll save tremendous amounts of energy and enjoy climbing way more! I know tons of people with similar power to weight who can keep up easily on the first 2 cols, but collapse on the 3rd because they waste tons of energy due to an undertrained core.
Training tip, as mentioned in the video below, find a piece of road or circuit that you can ride uninterrupted and focus primarily on NOT stopping pedalling, not even 1 second! On a steep climb, you'll fall over if you stop pedalling so this is definitely a skill you need to train! This can and should be mentally challenging, since those micro breaks can help a lot for recovery but therefore you have to become used to this accumulated fatigue during a long and hard climb.
While at the topic of the mind, teach yourself mind games, mantra's, counting or whatever keeps you going. For me this is best done during horribly hard intervals (when you're literally counting and praying for it to be over, #VO2max for instance). These will force you to focus on something else that the pain in your legs and this is an incredible tool to have when climbing. In the mountains I use it to break down the mountain in 100 vertical meters, or every hairpin, or every km, or I'm singing in my head, counting pedal strokes, forcing a smile, repeating a mantra in my head, all simple tricks to distract from the pain. Added benefit of the intervals is that you get stronger, so you'll climb faster, hahaha 
Final tip, I've done training plan dedicated to climbing, can't remember exactly what the specific sessions where, but I do remember that some of them where definitely not what I expected but did contribute in the end, so if you're really dedicated find a coach or plan to help you with this!