Got this e-mail a few days ago from Tony Beasley regarding his success from reading the 15 Fastest Ways to Improve Your Hill Climbing:

Last year I purchased your 15 Fastest ways to improve your hill climbing e-book, I am a 60yo male and an Vets E-grade road rider, for several reasons I was not able to start your hill climbing program until the beginning of this year, I had one particular ACT Vets CC hill climbing race as my target race, this was last Saturday, leading up to this race I competed in 2 Graded Scratch races (1st and 4th), 2 Handicaps (2 x 5th overall, 2nd and 1st E-grader) and one TT (1st) all of them on hilly courses.

With the Vets hill climbing Race (graded scratch) on the weekend the E-grade course was 26k in length with 670 meters total climbing with around 300 meters of the climbing in a 3.0k section starting 7 k from the finish with a maximum gradient of 20%, the final 7k is classed as a grade three climb on Strava with an average gradient of 6% which includes some flat and downhill sections.

E-grade started with 11 riders, half the pack had dropped off before the start of the major climb due to a strong pace up a few small climbs, at the start of the major climb I found myself at the front, I decided as mentioned in your book to concentrate on my pedalling technique and keeping a steady fast cadence, after a few hundred meters there was only 2 of us left, the road was getting steeper and after about 1k the other E-grade rider was starting to drop off, after 2k at the steepest section I was on my own and it was then the A-grade pack caught me, they started earlier and had a longer course, I was surprised that the A-grade pack did not go past me as fast as I had expected, I kept them in sight on the steep section and it wasn’t until the flatter part of the climb they really started to pull away, I only was passed by one more rider in the last 4k.

I won E-grade by nearly 3 minutes and finished 18 minutes in front of the last E-grade rider. I put my good performances down to following the training program and techniques in your Hill Climbing book.

Many thanks for your book and I love your coaching tips.

Tony Beasley