The Beauty of Hill Reps

Hill reps are the purest form of interval training. No complexity. No special equipment. Warm up, go full gas, recover, repeat, cool down, cafe.

“The slower you roll on the flats, the faster you’ll go up the climbs.”

Do them with friends and they become oddly social. You warm up together, attack the hill at your own pace, regroup at the top, spin to the cafe talking about your power numbers to anyone who hasn’t managed to escape yet.

The beauty of a climb is that nobody gets dropped for long. You might get shelled at the first hairpin, but you roll off the top and wait. Everybody reconvenes. The hill is the great equaliser.

You can build routes with variety, using a different climb each time. Or rep the same climb, chase your Strava segments, compare splits, build toward a specific race or event. Both approaches work. Both approaches hurt.

Spring is the season for this. The cold morning air forces you to ride hard just to generate heat. The race calendar comes back to life: Flanders, Roubaix, Strade Bianche, Liège-Bastogne-Liège. It’s impossible to watch those races and not want to go out immediately and suffer on a climb.

You know you’ve gone deep when your lungs burn and you can taste metal. That is iron: your red blood cells under load, releasing what cyclists call “Belgian toothpaste.” The taste of a job well done, soon to be replaced by coffee.

Niki Terpstra, Paris-Roubaix 2014, attacking the final sector of pavé with six kilometres to go. Look at the string inside his mouth. That is a man who has committed completely.

Not every rider is a climber. But every rider loves reaching the top.

There is nothing else in cycling quite like that feeling. The gradient kicks up. The cadence drops. The burn builds. Then you crest it, the world opens out in front of you, the legs spin free, and for a few seconds everything is perfect.

My ideal version of this sport: an endless climb with no summit. Just leave me there, half-wheeling my grandad for eternity.

“See you at the top.”

My dad always said: “Get the best bib shorts and wheels you can afford.” The best piece of cycling advice I have ever received. Good bibs keep you comfortable all day. Good wheels keep you rolling when your legs are gone.

He was right. He usually is.

Gareth.