About BUMPS

A points series for people who ride uphill on purpose

BUMPS began in 2009, when three race organizers noticed they were serving the same riders. Mary Power ran the Mt. Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb, Andy Holtzman ran the climb up Mount Equinox, and Keone Maher promoted the hillclimb at Burke Mountain. The same faces kept turning up at all three start lines, chasing the same private goal, with no way to compare a summer's worth of suffering. Linking the races into one standings table was the obvious fix. Doug Jansen, a New Hampshire rider who worked with data, built the first website and scoring system that made it real.

The first calendar strung together nine races across four states and more than 27,000 feet of climbing. The rules were built so nobody had to travel to everything: your best five results counted, and the hardest climbs carried a little more weight. Mount Washington sat at the center of it then and still does, 7.6 miles at an average of 12% with a final pitch of 22%.

The middle years

By the mid 2010s the series was carrying more than a thousand riders a season. Our own archive shows the peak plainly: 1,129 riders in 2013, 1,158 in 2014, 1,011 in 2015. There were leader's jerseys, Ironman awards for finishing every event on the calendar, Clydesdale and Filly categories, and age groups, all of it built on the same idea that a series should have room for more than one kind of fast.

Then it faded, the way volunteer-run things do when the volunteers are tired. Participation fell off through 2016 and 2017 and the series effectively went quiet.

Tom Coughlan brought it back in 2018. The numbers turned around with him, climbing back toward a thousand riders by 2019. After he died, Dan Tavelli and Donna Wilson kept the series going, steering it through the pandemic gap and on through 2024.

Where it stands

The 2025 season closed with Joshua Mcdougal on 400.0 points and Kristen Kulchinsky on 397.1, both of them winning their standings on the last climbs of the year. The archive behind this site now holds 17,227 finishes across 13 mountains, going back to 2008, and every one of those results is scored under the rules that were actually in force that season. The rules have changed more than once, and how points and qualifying work explains what counted when.

What has not changed is the shape of the thing. There is no membership and no sign-up fee. You enter a race the way you always would, you ride up a mountain, and the series picks up your result and puts it next to everyone else's. Two finishes make you a ranked rider. Every finish is also scored age-graded, so a 65-year-old's best day can outrank a 25-year-old's.

What's next

The plan for 2026 is more storytelling from the events themselves, results that are quicker to read on the phone in your jersey pocket at the summit, and awards that recognize showing up as well as winning. If you want to help with any of that, get involved.

The full honor roll of past winners lives on the series champions page.