Jan 25: Hill climb training in the Netherlands

Haha look, a blog post is desperately exaggerating things for lolz! Actually I'm serious, and ask you to please respect my hill climbing needs. Those Spanish elevation graphs are starting to look a lot like teeth, and that's a good reason to get into some proper training. Or therapy. But training is probably cheaper so let's start there.

There’s a LOT of climbing coming up. In Spain there’s a 300m climb for every day of the route. In the Netherlands there’s about 330m between the highest and the lowest point in the whole country. The best Amsterdam can offer is probably +10m to go over an especially high bridge. So a stationary bike is really the only option.

A couple of gyms specialize in cycle training, so I called up one to ask about hill training. They had a hill climbing class at 6:30am the next day: was I interested? I’m not interested in anything at 6:30 except more sleep! But those damn toothy climbs kept coming to mind so I said yes; that meant a 5:30 alarm and getting out the house so early the cat didn’t even meow for breakfast.

The biking class was a bit unusual but fun enough: you needed to adjust the resistance of your bike up and down to match the “slope” which changed to match some vicious hillclimb. 95%! Back on the slope, crank the resistance up a notch. 65%! Turn the resistance down and have a breather and visualize yourself going through a hairpin bend. 110%! A steeper bit. And so on. I’m not interested in visualizing hairpin bends, matching resistances and keeping RPM is enough for me. Also the resistance readout has a few seconds of lag so it takes a bit of practice to get it right. Nevertheless, it’s more intense than it sounds.

It was a bit awkward, and not as bad as a real mountain… but it’s still the best hill climbing practice I can get so I guess I’ll be going back for more.