Here are your CW5000 May challenges

We’re well into spring and we hope your fitness is now in a good place, your mileage on track and you're in place to try something a little harder. 

Your two challenges this month both have a different focus. One a distance challenge, the other testing your climbing ability and seeing if you can improve it within a month.

>>>> Sign up to the CW5000 challenge and get inspired to ride

Completing the climbing challenge might not directly result in big mileage, but by improving your climbing you’ll be improving your top end fitness, meaning you’ll be in better shape to tackle your usual routes. 

Remember to let us know when you’ve completed either or both of the challenges. We’d love to hear about the hill you choose for challenge number one, and how you went about taking on the challenge. 

Send details cycling@futurenet.com so we can include your story in our monthly round up. Best of luck!

1. Improve your time on a local climb

Taking the emphasis off miles, we want you to work on your hill climbing. This will naturally improve your fitness. Or, coming at it from another angle, if your fitness is improving you should be able to improve your climbing. Pick a climb you know well and ride up it as hard as you can. Time yourself by lapping your gps head unit or create a segment on Strava and let it capture your time.

Then, later in the month do the same again and try to improve your time. If you want to do some specific training for this simply train yourself over the time it takes you to do the climb. If it’s a three minute climb, work on that length of effort in your training. No matter how long the climb try not to go too hard too soon. The best way to set a pb is to maintain a constant power all the way up. Although this isn’t easy to do. You can ride the climb as many times as you want in order to improve your time.

2. Ride 150 miles in a week

This is a big week of riding, but with more daylight hours and warmer weather it should be achievable for most people, especially if you can get in one big ride in over a weekend. We’ll accept the distance being covered over a consecutive seven day period, it doesn’t have to be Monday to Sunday. Virtual miles can be counted towards this challenge.