Monday 10 October 2011

Holme Valley Wheelers HC Holme Moss

Saturday saw me wake up to a cold and miserable day. A stark contrast to the 29 degrees of the previous week but i suppose this is proper hill climbing weather. This is the first time i have done this event as i normally try to save my energy for our own event in the afternoon but this year i am trying to support the local event's. The weather seemed to get even worse the closer we got to Holme and the mist was covering the top of the climb. This year they moved the start time back an hour to 11am to make it closer to the HSW event and also to try and stop the fog and mist problems they some times get from a 10am start time. It is the coldest i have been warming up this year and from what people were saying the wind was going to be a challenge on the climb. Holme Moss is not i climb i enjoy climbing as it always seems to suffer from bad winds. Even climbing it 20 times in the summer has not made me like it any better.

After warming up i decided to wear arm warmers and full finger gloves as i don't like the cold much. The first 200 meters were sheltered from the wind and you seemed to be flying but then just as you got out of sight of the start the wind hit. I would normally do i climb like this in the 39x21 but i just couldn't get the cadence high so dropped down into the 39x23. The wind didn't let up until about 150m from the car park at the top but then over the top it was a strong head wind which meant sprinting for the line wasn't going to help much. I felt i finished ok but was probably a little over dressed on the climb as i overheated a bit but didn't want to get to cold on the decent. I finished with  a time of 8:21.4 for 7 place.

I didn't warm down as it started to rain and i also needed to get over and put the signs out for our own race in the afternoon. But a good turn out of 30 riders and a big thanks goes to Richard Haigh and all at Holme Valley Wheelers for making the event happen.

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