How to take the Box Hill KOM

Box Hill, an esteemed name cherished by cyclists, resonates with profound significance. It transcends being a mere hill, evolving into a symphony of emotions, an exhilarating ballet embodying the fusion of man and machine, an awe-inspiring testament to the unyielding human spirit. Memories immediately turn to the London 2012 Olympics as the GB team train powered up there with reigning Tour de France champion Wiggins guiding Cav for a glorious sprint – which didn’t quite work out. 

Approaching Box Hill, cyclists experience a surge of anticipation, their hearts racing in sync with the winding road ahead. It unfurls like a clandestine pathway to a cycling utopia, beckoning them to embark upon its mystical 5% gradient. Legs tense and  muscles poised. The surrounding world dissipates into the periphery, and their focus narrows upon the rhythmic symbiosis between body and bicycle. The symphony of their breath intertwines harmoniously with the whirring of the chain, and the steady cadence of their heartbeat morphs into a metronome of unwavering determination.

The apex of Box Hill unveils a panoramic vista that steals their breath away, a well-deserved reward for their gargantuan effort. Boundless horizons of undulating hills sprawl before them, an intricately woven tapestry of limitless possibilities. In that singular moment, every ache, every drop of sweat, and every ounce of effort finds profound purpose… as your ride uploads to Strava and Rory Townsend gets an email saying someone has just nicked his KOM.

Our tips on sending Rory Townsend an email

Box Hill means a lot to cyclists in the UK – not as much as it used to but the KOM is still a big one. All Strava nerds know who holds it and we are going to advise you on how you might go about trying to take it with the help of myWindsock.

This 3D veloviewer map allows us to visualise how the segment of box hill will play out when we ride it.

As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a large number of segments on Box Hill but this map gives us a good idea of the main features of the climb – namely that it’s not particularly steep. This means aerodynamics plays a large role. Box Hill is a particularly interesting segment as pretty much all forces play a significant role in slowing you down (whereas usually either weight or aerodynamics are overwhelmingly dominant). 

We are still going up a climb, however, so as you can see gravity is the strongest resistive force. The rolling resistance and air resistance make up over 20% of what is slowing us down; however, this means that for every 100W we put through the pedals, 20W isn’t doing work against gravity. 

The elevation gain on this segment is 118m which means we need to do 92575J of work against gravity to get to the top and there’s nothing we can do about this. In order to reduce the amount of energy lost to the other resistive forces, we have three main strategies…

  1. Drafting – if you’re behind something big enough, air resistance can be practically zero. I recommend a car with the boot open in front and a van behind. Obviously, if you do decide to take this route, don’t do it on a busy day…
This shows us the huge difference that drafting can make. By sitting between two relatively large vehicles a rider could get their aerodynamic resistance relatively close to zero. It’s been measured that a rider in the middle of a peloton faces around 5% of the air resistance a rider on the front would face – so it’s not too different from that, possibly a tad more dangerous.

In reality, you won’t be able to get your cda down to zero but you probably can get pretty close if you’re willing to risk your life. For a rider (and bike) that weighs 80kg doing 400W, removing air resistance is enough to take the KOM. 

2. Fast tyres – using myWindsock’s advanced settings we can change the rolling resistance and drivetrain losses. Imagining we’ve splashed out on all the latest tech and halved our rolling resistance and dropped our drivetrain losses by half a percent, we can save ourselves 13s.

3. Weight loss – it’s likely that we won’t be able to lose weight ourselves, but let’s imagine we are a 70kg rider with 6kg of extra baggage (bike, clothes, shoes and such) so we can drop our system weight down to 76kg from 80kg. This is another 12s saved.

Overall this trickery has taken our time down to 4 minutes dead. The KOM is currently at 4:32 so if you want to take the box hill kom and don’t have many watts, simply cheat and buy very posh bike parts. 

If you want to know how much difference various factors make on your own personal segment bashing quests, sign up to myWindsock here.