I rode up a bloody big hill at full-tilt (ish) on the road bike last night halfway around my loop, just to see how long it took to get to the top. The plan is to do that once a month thereby giving me an idea of where I’m at with my overall condition and how much progress I’m making.

The climb in question is a few miles long, from the bottom to the top of Ashworth Road – basically it climbs from the Rochdale-Bury road to Owd Bett’s. It’s long, dark and rough but ideally it’s reasonably sheltered from the weather. The gradients range from “quite tough” to “rather vicious” to “OUCH”. Last night’s time was 15 mins 50 secs. I’ll do it again in a month to see if I can do it quicker.

The ride to Edenfield from the top of the climb was a bonkers as ever – stupidly fast, dark and as usual, incredibly windy.  

My Garmin Edge seems to be having a few issues too – it was apparently asleep for a big portion of the ride and recorded my maximum HR at 246bpm with a rather impressive (and quite improbable) top speed of 86mph. I’m going to update the firmware later on.