Day 1 22 June 2012 Porto-Vecchio to Bastia 212 km with 1x 4th cat mountain climb
Much of the route they will be riding is mountainous and to understand the blog it might be more interesting to know the categories of climbs.
Categories of mountain climb.
Cycling climbs are graded from 1 to 4 according to their difficulty. Four is the easiest and by comparison the toughest is awarded a grade one. Cheddar Gorge in the UK is a category 3 climb with an altitude gain of 250 metres, if it were longer or steeper it would be a higher category. Norfolk has no categorized climbs. However that is all too simple as there are some climbs which are so long or steep that they are given the HC grade or “beyond categorization”. This sounds dramatic but they are real monster hills and always involve climbing at least on kilometre in altitude, some almost two. More than 500m of altitude gain is approximately a category 1. You can work the rest out yourself but these cats are a little loose and categorization is not an exact science.
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