Hillclimb

Elushion

Hi,
The next event on my agenda is a 1mile hillclimb. How should I approach this? Full out sprint?

inseine

If you think that you can sprint flat for a mile.......up a hill. Well, can you?

boybiker

You could always cry, thats what I intend to do if people try to make me race up hills

shockedsoshocked

Elushion wrote:

Hi,
The next event on my agenda is a 1mile hillclimb. How should I approach this? Full out sprint?

The hill climbs i've attended tend to go just be full out balls to the wall efforts.

Usually with some St Johns blokes at the top holding an oxygen mask

knedlicky

Full out from the start isn’t the right approach on a hill climb, although this one is so short, you’ll have to get up to speed pretty quickly.
And because of the sudden effort required, you'll need to warm-up properly beforehand. (Even for this short distance, some I know would warm up for as long as 60 mins, with an intense few mins in the middle of the warm-up session.)

If you have chance, ride the climb a couple of times in advance, one more casually, one with effort, you’ll then have a better feel for the climb and also know with what effort you can still be going at full speed when crossing the line - you don't want to lose it near the end.

cougie

Surely it depends on the gradient - most hills arent the same all the way up.

Basically ride as hard as you can sustain for the whole mile. And only you can really judge that.

Altho I like the crying tactic too.

DavidBelcher

Did my first-ever HC last night, actually quite good fun in spite of all the suffering! Came 4th out of a tiny field of 6, though the first 4 of us were quite closely spaced time-wise. I clocked 2 mins 32 sec for a half-mile ascent. Hill itself was quite short really, if it had taken place on some of the much longer HC courses like those in North Wales, Northern England, etc. I suspect the experience would've been far less pleasant!

David