National Hill Climb Champs 2020
Sunday saw the National Hill Climb Championships take place up Streatley Hill near Reading, which saw a field of almost 500 riders sign-up with over 100 women.
The climb was short and steep - sub 3 minutes for the fastest women with the fastest time of 2.04 set by Andrew Feather, winner also of Macclesfield Wheelers’ Tegg’s Nose Hill Climb held back in August.
In total 4 riders from Macclesfield Wheelers made the journey south.
Monica Greenwood took the Bronze medal in the women’s event with husband (2005 National Champion) Ben Greenwood taking 22nd in the men’s category alongside Matt Lawton in 72nd. Meanwhile Ollie Smyth took 34th in the Junior men’s category.
Every rider in the event will have a story about how they came to be there taking part in one of the most unique and physically demanding cycling disciplines, in a year that has challenged everyone as every part of life has changed.
Monica’s story as a bike rider began on an MTB riding around the Peak District with her school friend Richard, often involving getting lost and coming home in the dark after a day of exploration. Things got more serious when Monica was selected for the British Cycling Talent Team in 2005 as an under 16 rider, but being new to the sport with limited understanding, that’s as far as her racing journey with the Great Britain Cycling Team went.
The following year, Monica had up until a few days ago her best moment in cycling when she took a bronze medal in the National Junior Women’s Road Race Championships in her home county of Cheshire. Her next national medal took 14 years and an unlikely journey to find.
After attempting to combine racing with her job in a corner shop that involved getting up at 5.30am every morning, eventually fatigue and lack of money took it’s toll and Monica left the sport, a wasted talent unable to continue alone without anyone in her corner to support her.
Fast forward to 2017 and Monica was now a coach with the Great Britain Cycling team, another unlikely journey where she worked her way up from coaching in a local youth club in Manchester to becoming the National Junior girls endurance coach, where until recently she spent five years as the only female coach in the whole of the GB Cycling Team.
It was ironic that Monica won the recent Holme Moss Hill Climb which was an event that prompted a huge campaign to gain women equality in hill climbing, having battled alone for so many years as a role model for women in a totally male dominated environment.
It was during 2017 that Monica started to attempt some road and circuit racing for the first time in nearly ten years, and that is when the love she had for the sport as a youngster began to return. Racing after a long layoff is scary enough, doing it when you’re a national team coach is even more challenging. The fear of looking bad on the bike, when you are supposed to be the person who knows what to do is a strong emotion to overcome. Especially when you never got as a rider to the level of races that you’re coaching at.
Despite this Monica decided to keep going and upped her training around work commitments. It is a job where you cannot ride your bike for up to two weeks at a time when you’re away at races, so the progress was slow, and the improvement fairly limited.
Climbing was certainly a weakness for Monica initially as she struggled to make a top 20 of any of the local uphill Strava’s. In fact, she often went for the downhill ones to try to make a top 10 as they were the only ones she was competitive in.
2018 and 2019 saw some more steady progress which saw wins in some smaller level road and circuit races and even a local hill climb win, on the Brickworks climb near home on the edge of the Peak District.
Fast forward to March this year and Monica travelled to Belgium to race her first ever race outside the UK in a kermesse in Belgium. It had been her lifelong dream to do a bike race in another country and at 31 years old and after a near ten-year break from the sport, it was finally going to happen. Unfortunately, as she rode round the circuit the day before the race, learning the race route for the following day, the Belgian government were announcing a ban on all sporting events. The dream was going to have to wait for another year.
It quickly became apparent road racing wasn’t going to happen, so despite being a rider who didn’t previously enjoy uphill’s, and much preferred a bunch sprint, the National Hill climbs champs became the only option with a top 20 the target.
One advantage Monica does have is she’s one of the best coaches of females in the world having coaches numerous World and European Junior medallists along with the top ranked juniors in the world on the road for the past two seasons in Pfeiffer Georgi and Elynor Backstedt. So, faced with no races to race as either a rider or in her job as a coach, Monica started training harder than ever.
The regime was tough with a thirty-minute core session every morning before breakfast, as well as some punishing gym and on bike sessions including attempting to get as many uphill Strava segments in the local area. As a lot of them are held by super strong riders like Lizzie Banks and Hannah Rhodes, that was going to be a serious challenge.
Despite working hard and the power numbers improving bit by bit, the results in the hill climbs were not suggesting a medal was possible a month out from the nationals. With some healthy eating Monica managed to get down to a race weight of 58kg, which had been as high as 70kg only three years previously. That with some borrowed kit by friends from the Macclesfield Wheelers to make the bike lighter and suddenly a top 10 seemed possible.
After a win in the Holme Moss event with a massive 10-minute power PB of 313W brought some confidence, a little bit of research suggested around 7W/KG might result in a medal in the women’s event. For Monica this would be around 400W for 3 minutes. With a previous best of 367W for 3 minutes, this seemed to be unlikely.
Despite having a former men’s National Champions as a husband, Monica is self-trained and races in her own way, so she decided to start at 400W, and just hold it for as long as she could. That turned out to be all the way to the finish line, with a time of 2:58.85 the result with an average power of 407W. This time was soon equalled by Becky Storrie in a dead heat which lead all the way until the final two racers who finally beat the time with Bitha Jones taking the win from Mary Wilkinson. Which meant a bronze for Monica in the 2020 National Hill Climb Championships.
So that is it. The story of the woman who avoided climbs as she struggled so much uphill. The woman who quit the sport disillusioned and frustrated. The woman who did something no other woman at the time was doing and became a national team coach. And finally, the woman who taught herself to do the part of cycling she was worst at, the non-climber who became a climber. She is already talking about next year’s race which is rumoured to be on home roads on either Winnat’s Pass or Mam Nick.
The hill climber who couldn’t climb, has a new challenge in her sights.