In a bid to avoid the rush hour, and to break up what is a huge grind of a task I have at work, I decided to get out for an hour over lunch (or Dinner, as we call it up North), and go pedalling.
It’s a fairly nice day out and about and I fancied something different from the usual flat TT-esque route. Why not do a bit of climbing then?
Being my dinner break I only had an hour (give or take) to get out, get the work done, and get back. Perhaps rather ambitiously I figured I could get out to Jeffrey Hill, do the climb, and get back in under an hour.
Well, it turns out it’s >30km in distance (I could have checked pre-ride), of course there’s a climb in there, and I’m no pro.
No surprises them, this one took me longer than an hour.
My plan today was to be fairly steady. I wanted to hold ~3.4w/kg as best I could for the uphill leg. That should be ~50% of the ride as I planned to turn around and come back exactly the same way coming home.
I am a little confused by that Elevation graph looking at it.
Surely, given that I turned around and came home the exact same way, the first and second halves should be symetrical?
That’s odd.
Anyway, yeah I didn’t do amazingly today on Jeffrey. I can’t find out from Strava exactly how I did compared to previous attempts, but I’d been keeping a steady trot on the way up to Jeffers, and by the time I got there I was a little bit cooked.
Also as it started to flatten out a touch nearer the top, I really struggled to get back from the little ring back up to the big. That, I think, is a symptom of my shonky indexing as of late. I’m not sure if the bike has taken a knock or the wires have slackened up, but I’m getting all manner of squeaks, phantom shifts, and double shifts.
Taking the ride as pure exercise, this one was a good one.
Getting out up a nice hill, with a nice view, on a random Thursday week day is always nice.
There was no indication we were in February either. I was sweating buckets. Nice and warm, but not overly so.
Anyway, that’s that. Tomorrow’s a rest day. I’ll enjoy that.
Elevation graphs in Garmin Connect don’t look symmetrical because they are plotted with time on the X-axis – changing that to distance will make it symmetrical!
Ahhh. Well, if that hadn’t been pointed out to me I don’t know when / if I would have ever figured it out. Thanks for the heads up Robert, much appreciated.