Update part 9 - Irish Hill Climb Champs

After the World Champs my off-season more or less started. I still had one race, the Irish National Hill Climb Champs in Tralee, but it wasn't actually an official championship for women, so competition would be expected to be few for me - I was mainly going along to support Ryan who was hoping to defend his title. So all I had to do was try and not over indulge in all the nice foods that I had abstained from in order to loose weight and keep my legs moving. As predicted, there were very few women at the hill climb champs (3) and I decided to use my power tap in the race (I don't usually because of the weight penalty, and because it's on a wheel built for sturdyness and not aerodynamics) to get some measurements. I won the women's race with a time of 14min 18sec and an average power of 343W. The courses 3.9km long and climbed 295m with an average gradient of 8%, levelling off in the middle for a bit, but then ramping up with about 1km to go. In contrast to the sunshine and beautiful views when we recce'd the course the day before we now had misty fog and a massive headwind to battle. It was interesting to see the power - I included the file below, again I went out too hard at the start, dropping power towards the end. Ryan came 2nd with only 0.7 of a second behind the winner, Mark Dowling, who had beaten him already 2 years ago (Ryan blames me for having taken him a bag of delicious Cantucci home from Florence - ooops!).