Seeing as #30daysofbiking was (for me) about doing bike stuff that wasn’t the norm, I decided that today I would be bag a Strava ‘King of the Mountains’ somewhere, somehow, however daft – something that I never usually do.
Strava, as great a training and analysis tool it is, has done weird things to club level riding. Using gravity and the personal ‘timber’ to bag downhill segments has become an obsessive pastime for some, for others it seems to be screwing up the data sets with stupidly short challenges in frankly dangerous places. I’ve long since hidden anything stupid in my logs to keep the data clean and meaningful.
The valley, like everywhere else these days is criss-crossed with Strava segments hidden from view, lurking in the undergrowth until they appear, magic-like when you upload your post ride data. Today should have been an ‘off’ day, so I rode loads of local trails whilst it was quiet with the aim of eking out segments and being top of the heap for at least one.
A half hour later and I’m now KOM on ‘Up and over the railway’ a ‘challenging’ ‘climb’ of some 58ft over 0.2 miles with an average grade of 5% – it’s a nonsense, it’s another part of Route 66 that’s recently been tarmaced, making the once bumpy rise now pristine blacktop, interrupted with some pretty cobbled speed humps.
It was fun for a few minutes and I’m not really sure what benefits my regal status gains me?
