Hitting the Hills
Although we live in West Wales with the beach and sea to the west of us and a backdrop of the Cambrian Mountains behind us, most of my running and even my cycling is on fairly flat courses. Obviously the mountain biking isn’t, but my quick road bike routes usually go from home and stay quite flat and if I want to run on a hill I have to run about 4 miles to get to one in the first place.
I had a good ride on Friday though with one nice big hill in it. I rode out from Ynyslas to Machynlleth and then went up the hill through Forge an on up the mountain past Glaslyn Lake and onto Dylife. I haven’t done this on a bike before and it’s quite a climb that steepens up ‘nicely’ towards the top. It was then a mad descent into Llanbrynmair before heading back via Cemmaes Road to Machynlleth and on towards home.
It was all still fairly flat except for the one big hill, as can be seen on the topography from my GPS track.
Ride Topography
I also uploaded my route to MapMyRide.
Climb Analysis
I can’t start recording everything here as well as within Ascent and Garmin Connect but I quite like the climb analysis feature it has. As well as showing you your route etc. it also analyses the route and identifies any significant climbs based on length and gradient and then categorises them for you in the same way as climbs in the Tour de France are classified.
As you can see in the screenshot to the right, the climb on Friday’s ride was classified as a Category 2 climb, it was 4.56 miles long climbing to 1,625 feet with an average gradient of 5.6%.
