The Hill Climb That Counted

The fog reaches the second bend before the first rider does. I am standing at a turnout high on the mountain with a paper cup going cold in my hand, and below me the road comes up out of the gray in sections: a guardrail, a wet curve, then a rider alone, shoulders rocking, front wheel wandering a little at the speed a steep grade allows. He passes without looking up. A minute later the road is empty again. A hill climb does not give a spectator much, only this, one body against one hill, arriving one at a time out of the weather.

One rider, one clock, one hill

The hill climb is the simplest form the sport has. A rider starts alone, usually at a set interval behind the rider before, and rides to a finish line that is higher than the start. There is no pack to hide in, no wheel to follow, no sprint to wait for. The clock is the only opponent that matters, and the clock does not care about tactics.

It is, in structure, a time trial that goes up. Officials record each start, riders go off one by one through the morning, and the result sheet at the end is a clean ladder of times from fastest to slowest. Drafting, the great economy of road racing, barely exists here, because the speeds are low, the wind matters less than the gradient, and the riders are spread across the whole course anyway.

How a hill climb morning runs

The morning has its own rhythm. Registration happens at the bottom, in whatever parking lot or picnic ground the mountain offers. Riders warm up on trainers beside their cars or on the flat approach roads, because there is no gentle first mile waiting for them. The start order is posted, fields go off in turn, and for hours the course holds exactly one kind of picture: a rider, a gap of road, another rider.

At the top, the finish line is a strip of tape, a timer's table, and a crowd of people who finished earlier and stayed to watch the suffering arrive. Nobody descends until the last rider is up, or descends slowly, because the road is still a racecourse and the cold at the summit is worth enduring for the view of each new arrival. The whole event has the patience of a ceremony, hours long, without a single wasted gesture.

Mt. Tamalpais, and a tradition kept

On the West Coast, the form has a fixed address. The hill climb on Mt. Tamalpais, the long ridge that closes the north end of the Golden Gate, has been run in one form or another since the 1960s, roughly twelve miles of climbing that ends near the East Peak. Generations of Bay Area riders have ridden it, which means generations of Bay Area families have stood at those same turnouts watching the road come up out of the fog.

A local racing club carried the organizer's clipboard for a stretch of years; the club that once kept this address on the web was among its keepers. Clubs change, volunteers age, permits get harder, and the climb keeps happening anyway, which is the surest sign that an event has become a tradition rather than a promotion. The record of who won in which year lives in the regional association's archives and in the mountain biking museum down in Fairfax; what I keep is the shape of the morning.

Why a climb is the purest amateur course

Every other form of racing lets a rider borrow speed. In a criterium you can sit in, in a road race you can follow wheels and gamble on the finish. A hill climb removes the borrowing. What remains is pacing, which is a craft, and the relationship between a rider's strength and a rider's weight, which is physics and cannot be negotiated with.

That is why amateurs love it and fear it in equal measure. There is no luck to blame. The rider who beats you beat you for twelve straight miles, which makes the result feel less like defeat and more like information. Age groups soften the arithmetic; a masters rider measures himself against his decade, a junior against hers. And because everyone rides the same road alone, the results page reads like a survey of the whole region, sorted honestly.

What the fog does to a field

Weather matters here more than anywhere. A dry year produces fast times and a fast legend; a wet year, like this one, produces a different race entirely. Riders cannot see the top, so they ride by effort rather than by landmarks. Times stretch. Some climbers thrive in the cold wet air and some unravel, and the sheet at the bottom of the results post records which is which.

The fog also edits the spectators. We see less and hear more: the breathing before the rider, the shift of gears on the steepest pitch, the small noises of a person working at their limit thirty feet away. A criterium is a spectacle. A hill climb in fog is closer to an overheard confession, each rider telling the road something true about how the morning is going.

A reader's closing note

I drove down with the timing sheets in a folder on the passenger seat, each page a column of names and numbers that will be typed up and posted before the week is out. The mountain keeps the effort; the paper keeps the order. Somewhere in those columns is the rider I watched come out of the gray at the second bend, now just a time beside a name, which is exactly what he rode all morning to become.