You’d think that being born and raised in the shadow of the Italian Alps, cyclist Paolo Cappo would take the gently rolling English countryside in his stride. But, as he explains, the lung-busting effort required for uphill sprints in competitive hill-climbing is tough in any setting
A very British WORDS PAOLO CAPPO PICTURES TIM ALLEN, PAUL DEAN AND MARK DAVIES
IN HIMALAYAN mountaineering, the region above 26,000 feet altitude is referred as the “death zone”, due to the irreversible damage to the brain cells caused by prolonged exposure to thin air. Hill-climbing, meanwhile, is a distinctively British cycling pursuit, hence a bit peculiar, if not completely mad. It may not exactly be the death zone – but it feels like it! Hill-climbing is an offshoot of timetrialling, with a brief and intense season from early September until the National Championship on the last weekend in October. As Covid-19 decimated Audax activity, I decided to give it a try.
Arrivée151Spring2021
LOCKDOWN My lockdown began a couple of weeks before it was formally announced. With family and friends in Italy already under tighter restrictions, I saw it coming and cleared my diary of any cycling commitment for 2020. I decided that Audax was going to take a back seat for a while. Nonetheless, with validated long distance riding gone, I still needed something to look forward to and I took inspiration from a book – A Corinthian Endeavour by Paul Jones, the story of the National Hill Climb Championship. In late March we were repeatedly told that three months was a realistic timescale to be out of lockdown, so there was a
32
realistic chance that time-trialling, and the hill-climbing season in particular, might resume during the summer and throughout the autumn. The solitary nature of the sport makes it an obvious candidate for racing during a pandemic. So a deal was struck. I decided I was going to swap the saddle sores of a 20 hour randonnee, for the agony of three minutes in the death zone. I’ve always liked cycling uphill – time to see if I was any good at it! I resolved to sign up early for a local Open double race up Dovers and Saintbury hills in the north Cotswolds, due to take place in mid-September, a reassuringly long way away. Qualifying races are called “Open” or “A-type” and you need an affiliated club membership to enter, as well as sign up for a free account on the Cycling Time Trails (CTT) website. Audax UK is an affiliated club, but this season I chose to race wearing the Kenilworth Wheelers CC colours. In my head a project was beginning to take shape: I was going to qualify and compete in the National Championship on 25 October, if that was ever going to go ahead. The more I read about the mad world of UK hill-climbing, the more it made sense: it’s a relatively low budget sport, which, unlike the flat time-trialling big brother, does not rely too heavily on purchasing the latest wonder equipment.
In fact, most competitors seem to ride pretty standard bicycles, often stripped of unnecessary sprockets, nuts and bolts. It’s not uncommon to see a generous use of hacksaws to reduce weight to the extreme. In the past, drilling holes through metal frames was “de rigueur”, nowadays, with composite materials, it seems to have gone out of fashion. Either way, the equation is simple – to go fast up a hill you need a high power-toweight ratio, so you ought to bring down your weight and build up your power output over the time frame, which in most cases is less than five minutes. THE WEIGHT During lockdown, many gained weight and others lost weight, as a reflection of a change in lifestyle. I was lucky enough to be in the latter category. Working from home meant no access to the departmental staff tea room, no bottomless provision of chocolate digestives and nobody’s birthday to celebrate on a weekly basis with cake. I’ve always been pretty disciplined with my food shopping. You won’t find crisps or biscuits in my trolley, so the BMI was mostly beefed up by the above-mentioned treats and the odd curry night out. Both were now out of the equation and I lost weight fairly rapidly. By May, when businesses began to
Most competitors seem to ride pretty standard ❝ bicycles, often stripped of unnecessary sprockets, nuts and bolts. It’s not uncommon to see a generous use of hacksaws to reduce weight to the extreme
❞
