Riding his first-ever competitive hill-climb, Nathan Chamberlain has become the new Redhill CC Hill Climb champion.
Nathan has only ridden some of the club time trial events previously but has shown ever-improving speed and natural ability.
As usual, the Club Hill Climb contest took place on the south side of Leith Hill with the one-mile course seeing the riders facing increasingly steep gradients up the challenging and strength-sapping 400 ft climb.
Early starters saw times drop from 6mins 45 secs down to 5mins 20 secs, the latter achieved by one of our top time trial riders, Andrew Murray until Nathan blazed off at the start. He has the build and strength characteristics of a natural climber being of medium height but very slim but with a lot of leg strength – this provides the ideal strength to weight ratio that takes a rider like him to the front of the field on the hills. With the stop watches running, Nathan, having warmed up thoroughly beforehand, accelerated up to his initial climbing speed, selected his optimum gear and settled into the pedalling and breathing rhythm that would see him through the five plus minutes of hard effort to the summit of the climb. Up past Leith Hill Place and he looked to be going well with a rock-steady, smooth riding action that showed that he was enjoying the challenge though he hadn’t yet faced either the steepest parts of the climb nor the false summits that drain the willpower and strength from struggling riders. However, notching down to a lower gear and a higher pedalling cadence he took both in his stride and accelerated up to the final crest and crossed the finish line to take first place with a time of 5 mins 02 secs.
Club Timekeeper John Eglington spoke afterwards about the competition: “The Club is involved in many different cycling disciplines and types of competition allowing riders to discover their strengths and to shine at their preferred events. It was great to see Nathan come first in this, his first competitive hill-climb. His riding in time trials has shown consistent improvement but now he has discovered that he is a natural climber as well and we look forward to seeing him feature in events in 2006”.