That’s exactly a minute faster than my previous best time for the hill climbing circuit (the old one, not the expanded one with Capron, Burlingame, etc.) Of course that’s not the whole story: the other time I was holding back on the first lap in preparation to give it everything on the second lap, which I never did, instead opting to do the east side hill loop. But today’s time could have been much better if I hadn’t had abnormally bad luck making some of my turns – I lost close to a minute waiting to turn onto Great Road from 123, another 30 seconds or so waiting for the light at 116 and probably a minute waiting to cross RT 7 on Harris. I can’t say for sure that I didn’t lose time in those spots (or other spots) on my previous runs, but today definitely seemed worse than normal.

doing the loop with an eye to overall time is a bit of a weird experience for me. If I ride at my own pace, I tend to take it easy on the flats and descents and punch it on the hills. Or, if I ride it with others, I try to duck out of the wind and recover as much as possible so that I can have as much energy as possible for the climbs. Today, I wanted to put down as good a time as possible in those in-between sections to allow myself a buffer in my average speed when I hit the climbs. The end result was that I climbed all of the climbs a bit slower than I would under other circumstances. The only exceptions were the two easy climbs (not even rated on my hills page) on Dexter Rock and 116. I usually shift into the little ring for those, but today I was able to power through them in the big ring. The question of course is whether I would have done better by arriving at the climbs with a slightly lower average speed but better legs to sprint up the hills? I’d also be very curious to see how a different type of rider would handle the same course. My guess is that even though there’s a lot of climbing, Gewilli would very easily ride the non-climbing and descending parts quick enough to post a much better time for the circuit.