Biking with the Birchwood club

So last night I went on my third ride with the guys from Birchwood, it seems that they have recently started a Tuesday night hill ride, which is nice from a training standpoint. For those of you who don't ride, well actually anyone who has ridden a bike knows just how hard it is to go up hill, hell a lot of the time it's easier to walk. But from a training perspective if you ride hills often you become stronger and you do so much quicker than any other method. However hill training in a city such as Minneapolis is much like it is in Edmonton, hard, not because of the hills, but because of the lack of significant climbs. But that being said the best is made of the available terrain.

The hills last night apparently were numbered at 12, no repeats, just ride from one to the next. Personally though I think that a few repeats would be good, as it seemed to me that there were only about 6 good hills and a few rises that were done quickly but with minimal effort. Of the hills that we rode a few stand out as being fun (ok, painful, but it's fun for cyclists, we're rather masochistic). One started at the foot of a bridge which we rode across the Mississippi and the road on the other side just kept going at the same grade as the bridge. The whole climb was about 3 km long, so that made for a nice effort, as long as you don't get caught at one of the two red lights. Another couple of hills were fun, shorter, about 2 km, but really curvy on the way up, which changes the grade a bit, meaning that you have to think about how you ride them.

The last hill of the night was Ramsey hill, I mentioned this one once before, it's probably about a kilometer at a 10% grade (this means that every 100 feet you go forward you go up 10). That was one of the two hills that I did not crest first. So that part kind of confused me, I've always been ok on hills, but never the best all night long, especially on new hills. So either the >30C temperature helps me or these guys need some work on their climbing skills. Either way, they were fun to ride with so I'll keep riding with them in the future, hopefully I can find another guy like Jere to make me work my ass of on the hills, only to be passed as if I was standing still in the last couple hundred meters. I just have to keep telling myself that it's good for me...so long as my heart doesn't explode ;)