Windy hills

One of the most popular long distance cycle routes in the UK is the C2C (read "sea to sea" geddit) which runs over the Lake District and the Pennines from the Irish Sea in the west to the North Sea in the east. Having crossed the Lake District the route climbs up the Hartside Pass from Penrith. The pass was built in 1824 by the famous road engineer John MacAdam and at the top is the Hartside Cafe (1904ft)  which looks over the Solway Firth to Scotland. It's a long climb.

Unlike being carried in a car, when you're riding a bike you develop a direct physical relationship with the landscape. Your feelings about it are modulated by the steepness and length of the hills and the strength and direction of the winds. But these two factors affect you in very different ways. To put it simply, hills are predictable but the wind is not.  You can set yourself against a hill but you have to take the wind as it comes.

If you ask people why they don't cycle then one of the common responses is that where they live it's too hilly. It might be surprising therefore, to find out that lots of regular cyclists really love hills and enjoy going up them almost as much as coming down. There's something about the effort that makes the view more rewarding.  Compared to riding on the flat, riding in the hills gives a much bigger view to effort ratio. On the few occasions that I've been skiing the view from the top of a hill that you've been carried or dragged up doesn't feel as substantial as one you've climbed yourself.

My local rides take me out into the North York Moors or onto the Yorkshire Wolds. Looking out over the landscape I can see the places that I've been, the hills that I know, and just seeing them is enough to evoke the sensations involved. Whilst the thrill of the descent is perhaps obvious the pleasure of the climb is less so. My own hypothesis is that it's about synchronising rhythms. Once, climbing up on off road track up Staxton Brow and could hear my own pulse I looked down at my watch and noted that I was taking 40 breaths per minute, pedalling at 80 revolutions per minute and had a heart rate of 160 beats per minute. In musical terms they were all playing the same note just in different octaves.

When you're climbing a hill, either by bike or on foot, you can often find yourself in dialogue with the terrain. Rather than feel disheartened by false summits I learned early on to treat them as failed attempts to tease. "If you'd wanted to put me off you shouldn't have given me something to aim for before the top" Though more often, all that happens is that you find yourself thinking about something else and then, mysteriously, arrive at the top.

The wind, however, is a pain. Unlike a slope you can't simply get in the right gear and then set yourself against it. When you're climbing a hill there's a simple relationship between the effort you put in and your rate of climb. Twice as much effort means you climb twice as fast. But because wind resistance varies with the square of the speed it takes 4 times the effort to go twice as fast. There's a law of diminishing returns and trying to maintain a steady pace against a gusting wind is almost impossible because the effort varies so rapidly.

In the days when I took students out for bike rides on a Wednesday afternoon the first thing we'd note was the wind direction. Head off with the wind and you could easily find yourself with a long struggle against the wind coming back. The simple rule was to head off into the wind and then you knew it wouldn't be too much trouble to get back. But, living on the east coast, this made it tricky if, like in the last few weeks, you were faced by strong easterlies.

Back to Hartside Pass. The C2C route picks up the main road about a third of the way up the pass. Up until that point it's on steep but quiet roads and the odd changes of gradient aren't too much trouble. The pass itself, however, has an astonishingly steady gradient and, once you've settled into a pace, isn't actually that hard to climb. It turns out that the horses pulling carts also prefer a steady gradient and that's why John Macadam built it that way. 

Thanks John.