what is elevation gain

Elevation gain refers to the total amount of ascent in elevation throughout an entire trip, while elevation loss refers to the total amount of descent in elevation throughout the same trip. It is sometimes also known as cumulative gain or simply gain, and is a key metric used to quantify the strenuousness of a trip. Elevation gain is an important value used in cycling, hiking, mountaineering, and running to measure the difficulty of a trip, as hiking a certain distance on flat land is significantly easier than hiking up and down a large mountain with the same round-trip distance. Elevation gain is usually measured in feet or meters, and is calculated by taking the difference between the summit elevation and the starting elevation in the simplest case of a trip where hikers only travel up on their way to a single summit.