HTC Hill Climb Challenge
On the links below are sub-pages for a set of hill climb challenges ranging from Hard to Easy and you can attempt any of them when you feel like it, post your time and see how you are doing against other club members. Most of you will know Norwood Edge, which is the Hard climb and for many of us this is 10-13minutes of real pain. The Timble climb is up a quiet road at the bottom of Fewson is well graded and you can stay in the saddle and give it your best wattage for 2 - 3.5mins. Of course not all of us are cycling lightweights who can spin up steep climbs like Egan Bernal or Kat Niewiadoma so I have included one for the 'rouleurs' which is the road from the back of Beckwithsaw up to the turn by Stainburn Forest. This is a climb, in that it goes up, but only at about 3% gradient and you can power it all the way in the saddle or even on aero-bars..
The then next tweak is how we can rank the data. (1) The first ranking is the simple climb-time, but that typically favours the younger lighter rider. So to compensate for that there is option (2) where I can calculate climbing-power, which I can do if you enter your weight+bike (stand on some scales in full kit holding your bike + bottle). If you have power stats from your bike and you can extract normalised power for the climb, you can include that instead. So the fastest rider up a climb may not be the 'most powerful' rider if there is a significant weight difference.
(3) Then it is possible to adjust for age and gender because typically max power and FTP starts to drop over the age of 35yrs and although world class female riders have power stats better than many men they are still significantly below equivalent world class male cyclists. How I do this I won't fully reveal but its based on my experience running FTP and max-min-power tests, particularly with female riders + British Cycling (BC) data I have access to. What this final ranking will give is a % score which indicates the extent to which I calculate you are close to BC Cat1 level for M/F and compensated for age - that doesn't mean whether you could be in a TDF team, but its a % equivalent to someone who performs very well in BC National events for their gender & age-group. It could be that some of you score over 100% if you are a very good climber, but bear in mind this is just for fun so everyone gets a change to move up the ranks, it isn't reliable as an indication of your full potential.
Enjoy!