Cat and Fiddle Hillclimb - Sun 28th Sep 08

Weaver Valley CC ‘Cat and Fiddle Hill Climb, Sunday 28^th September 2008 

At 515m the Cat and Fiddle pub is the second highest in England, and the road leading to it has been hailed as the most dangerous in Britain due to the large number of motorcyclists who swoop around its bends. From Macclesfield the road is 6½ miles long and climbs 335 metres. This was a far cry from the 2-3 minute hill climbs that I was used to down in the south, but I lined up along with eighty other starters in my first hill climb of the season. 

The Cat and Fiddle climb is not particularly steep, it rarely rises above a gradient of around 7%. It has fairly long flat sections, and even a downhill part which means that the average gradient is only around 4%.  However the organisers did employ a starting ramp which was a nice novelty.   

Conditions were good (although very misty at the top) and I put in a good performance and finished 20^th with 23.00 in a strong field headed by Mark Lovatt (19.19), who won the national championships on this course in 2002.  As 1 testament to the effort that I put in I was quite sick three or four times after crossing the finishing line (nicely away from the crowds where nobody would notice I must add), and I’m now wondering whether it was a good idea to enter five other hill climbs in the coming weeks!