Benchmarking: Castle Hill

Following on from the last post, it make sense that I benchmark myself against the other individual stage of the Tour of the North (v2021). This one an ascent of Castle Hill.

 

Castle Hill sits on the fringe of the Townsville CBD and the Townsville beachfront. It's bloody close to being a mountain - just a few feet short. 

There's a road that goes to the top - it winds its way around the hill. 2.5 Km long. It's popular with the tourists and locals. You get great views of the city, Magnetic Island and surrounding area, and it's a solid 60 minute walk up and down, so it's a good exercise spot. The road surface is pretty good and the car traffic very light.

 

It's also popular with the local cyclists. The rest of Townsville is largely flat, so it's pretty much the only decent climb in town. 

It's not though what I'd call an easy climb.

Here's the segment for the climb on Strava. 2.55 Km, 7.5% average gradient. It's far though from a consistent 7.5%. The first half of the climb is a series of short ramps (of up to 11%) with a number of flatter sections to provide some relief. After the last flatter section (which is known as the saddle) the remaining 900 m of the hill is a constant 10% apart from the final 100 m which jumps to 14%. 

It's that last 900 m that makes Castle hard work. Double digit gradients are never easy. It also limits how hard to can afford to go on the bottom section of the hill. Push too hard in the bottom, and you'll pay for it bigtime up the top.

So how did the D-graders go in the Tour of the North? Well again focusing on Knight-Hanson-Mort: Knight crushed out a 10.15, Hanson 12.01, Mort 12.41 (as a reminder Knight won the tour, Mort 2nd, Hanson 3rd). 

And me? Well today I punched out 18.15. 

That's the sort of gap that make you suck your teeth a bit. 8 minutes? That's an eye watering amount of time to make up. Well there is some good news on this front:

• This was only my 5th Castle Hill since embarking on my cunning plan to win the Tour of the North next year. My first climb was 21.03. So I've already found nearly 3 minutes.
• The time when your weight hurts your cycling most is when you are climbing. And as of last weigh in I'm still over the century. Using the rather clever Bike Calculator website, if I can drop from 100 kilos to 90 by raceday, I'll be almost 90 seconds faster up the climb 
• Segment misalignment. The actual climb used in the Tour of the North isn't actually perfectly matched to the Strava segment (the start-finishes might be out by 30-50 m at either end). And that make a big difference when you're sitting on 10 km/h. Thru comparisons of race times (across a number of grades) and a few of Strava segments, I'm confident in saying that's about another 15 seconds in my favour.
  

So if I bank the weight loss and the segment misalignment I'm back to a 16.30. The rest though will have to come from hard graft on the bike.