Finding the climbs near you (even if you live somewhere flat)
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Riders in flat places assume climbing training is unavailable to them. Riders in hilly places often train on whatever climb happens to be on their usual loop, which is rarely the best one within reach. Both are leaving something on the table, because a good training climb is a specific thing and it is findable.
What makes a climb good to train on
Not what makes a climb famous. The qualities that make a climb a great day out — length, spectacle, altitude, a café at the top — have almost nothing to do with what makes it a good place to do intervals every Tuesday.
For threshold work you want 8–20 minutes of continuous climbing. For VO2max efforts, 4–6 minutes is plenty. A 90-second ramp is a sprint venue, not a climb.
A consistent 6–8% is far more useful for training than a road that alternates 3% and 14%. You can hold a target on the first; on the second you are riding the terrain, not the plan.
You will ride it repeatedly, often in a slightly deranged state. A road with a junction at the top and no traffic is worth more than a famous climb on a main road.
The recovery between efforts happens going down. A technical, gravelly or busy descent means you arrive at the bottom of rep two more stressed than when you started.
The second point deserves emphasis. A steady gradient is what lets a climb double as a measurement device: ride it at threshold once a month under similar conditions and you have a repeatable test that costs nothing and is far more meaningful than another indoor FTP protocol. A climb with wildly varying pitch cannot do that job.
Four ways to find them
Read the contour map
Open a topographic map of your area and look for places where contour lines bunch together along a road. Tight lines mean steep ground; a road crossing several of them in a short distance is a climb.
Slow, and by far the most thorough. It finds the roads nobody has ridden, which are frequently the best ones.
Mine your own ride history
Look through rides you have already done for the steepest sustained sections. Most riders have ridden more climbs than they remember, usually as part of a loop rather than as a destination.
Fastest, and the results are pre-validated — you know the road surface and the traffic already.
Follow the water
Rivers and streams sit at the bottom of valleys. Any road that leaves a river and heads for a ridge line is climbing, and the map will show you where every one of them goes.
A reliable trick in hilly country. Valley-to-ridge roads are often quiet, because they connect small places rather than big ones.
Ask locally
A club run, a bike shop, or anyone who has ridden the area for a decade. Ask specifically for "a climb of about 10 minutes with decent surface and no traffic".
The only method that catches the things maps cannot: gravel trucks on weekday mornings, a surface that has broken up, a dog.
If you live somewhere genuinely flat
Three honest options, in order of how well they work:
- Ride the wind instead. A sustained headwind on an exposed road produces a very similar demand to a shallow climb: constant resistance, no coasting, a target you can hold. Riders in the Low Countries have trained this way for a century. Wind forecast for cyclists covers finding the days.
- Use big gears at low cadence. Torque work on the flat reproduces part of the muscular demand of climbing, though not the sustained steady-state element. Sprint work for riders who are not sprinters covers the protocol.
- Ride the climb indoors. The only method that reproduces the actual thing — sustained gradient, no freewheeling, no junctions — and the only one available on a Tuesday in February regardless of where you live.
That last one is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a consolation prize. Moveee Indoor will rebuild any route you have saved as a 3D road in a browser tab, with trainer resistance following the real gradient — so a rider in Flanders can do their threshold intervals on an actual alpine climb, repeatedly, without the drive. If you have a target event, riding its climbs in advance is the version of this that pays best: previewing a race course indoors.
Once you have found one, use it properly
A good climb is a training venue, so treat it like one. Learn what your sustainable power on it feels like — how to pace a climb with power is the method — and ride it at that effort rather than racing yourself up it every time. Repeated all-out efforts on the same hill produce a lot of suffering and surprisingly little progress.
And once a month, ride it as a test: same warm-up, same effort, same conditions as far as possible. Over a season that gives you a far better picture of your climbing than any single laboratory number — and unlike a test protocol, it is a road you actually enjoy.
Moveee's Route Engine can build routes that deliberately take in the climbing near you rather than avoiding it, which is a quick way to discover the roads your usual loop has been routing around for years. Climbing technique: seated vs standing covers what to do once you are on one.
Sources 5
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 Laursen PB, Jenkins DG The scientific basis for high-intensity interval training: optimising training programmes and maximising performance in highly trained endurance athletes · Sports Medicine · 2002
- 2 Buchheit M, Laursen PB High-intensity interval training, solutions to the programming puzzle: Part I: cardiopulmonary emphasis · Sports Medicine · 2013
- 3 Nimmerichter A, Eston R, Bachl N, Williams C Effects of low and high cadence interval training on power output in flat and uphill cycling time-trials · European Journal of Applied Physiology · 2012
- 4 Martin JC, Milliken DL, Cobb JE, McFadden KL, Coggan AR Validation of a mathematical model for road cycling power · Journal of Applied Biomechanics · 1998
- 5 A beginner's guide to understanding map contour lines · Ordnance Survey (OS GetOutside) · 2024
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