Good Hill Hunting

Having completed most of my training now with the Christmas challenge of endurance with 500kms over 7 days and the 3 recent rides all over 80 miles I am close to finishing my gruelling training for the L2P in 6 weeks’ time. The last element I need to improve and want to take on is hill training so the weekend was all about hunting out the most daunting hills I could find in 15 mile radius.

The weather was amazing this weekend and impeccable conditions for saddling up. Strangely the weather was almost too good and stretched your thinking towards embracing a beach, sunbed or bbq-ing in the back garden. This is a silly thing to say after battling the elements over those grim winter months but those dark days have definitely made me a stronger cyclist which I am now seeing the fruits of in my training.

I didn’t have any set route for my ride, which was oddly nice, as I am usually military about a cycle plan to achieve a certain distance. With the shackles off I headed towards previously unchartered land and south west towards Felden, Bovingdon and Chesham. Over 10 strong hills completed I realised that this is exactly the training I need to be doing now in order to keep up my cycle education and development.

A couple of hours in and nearly 30 miles clocked I still felt fresh and with a certain Strava segment approaching close to home I fancied at crack at becoming King of the Mountain (KOM) or at least entering the top 10. Head down, driving and peddling my nuts off I had my best crack at it. I wouldn’t find out the results though until uploading the data back at home. On upload I was absolutely chuffed to see that I had achieved first place and was the new KOM on a certain segment in the universe of Strava. I was very very happy with this as this is not the KOM segment I have been chasing for long time (early blog entry, which I am second on) but a recent one I discovered where there have been 1589 Attempts by 417 People. The icing on the cake was that I beat the top man by 5 clear seconds.....impressive, if I do say so myself.

A lovely end to the cycling week was capped by my first genuine KOM along with great hill work. I think I may have one last big hill ride over a long distance to complete for my training before the L2P and Wales looks like nice place to endure this from recent research.