How to choose the perfect hill

PICKING YOUR EVEREST

“I spent hours looking for a segment that would be good for it. I wrote a lot of them off as they required too much power,” says Hannah Rhodes Patterson. It’s a tricky balancing act: after her world record, Emma Pooley bemoaned the steepness of the 13 per cent hill she’d chosen, plus the technical nature of the descent.

Patterson says: “The Mam Tor climb is just about doable but the descent would have taken too long; also there’s a chance of getting held up by cars.

The main thing is I wanted to do 20-25 per cent off the QOM and still break the record. I didn’t want less than nine per cent average gradient and I wanted the descent to be straight and have no prolonged sections over 15 per cent.”

One of the advantages of hills in the US and some other countries is that they have wide and straight roads, allowing for faster descending. Lachlan Morton’s record, while it stood, was also set at altitude to reduce drag during descents.