Words and photos by Epic Rider Alan Grant

Singapore is flat. The biggest bump for cyclists is the 130m-high Mount Faber – obviously the people who named it were feeling a bit naughty that day. There are two “ascents” of Faber and both are tough, if short, routes but local cyclists end up having to do endless repeats of the 1.3km and 1.6km options to build their climbing legs.
Visiting the same spot every week to do your hill work can get a bit boring so luckily there are other options. My favourite is Rifle Range Road (RRR). It doesn’t quite climb as high as Faber – its “peak” is only 82m – and indeed it’s a different type of ride as it rolls and twist and turns rather than just going up. But it’s a leg-buster no doubt.
It’s situated in the Bukit Timah area of Singapore and I go there a lot, whether to do intervals, or more commonly, just to put in an impromptu flying lap as luckily it’s on the way home from many of my bread-and-butter rides up to the Mandai, Kranji or Admiralty areas.

Rifle Range Road location and profile
RRR is a dead-end road finishing at one of three Singapore Army bases on the route. You’ll also come across also the rundown Bukit Timah Gun Club and this collection of armory-themed sites perhaps explains the road’s name. It’s about 6.8km for the out-and-back benchmark effort.
The opening section of the ride is flat and if you’re lucky you might find yourself riding alongside a Malaysia-bound train as it winds its way through the green centre of Singapore.

Train tracks
The track and the road go their separate ways as the latter delivers the first right-hander. You can take it fast but I usually hold a little back as cars can come flying round the other side. A quick left-hander follows that takes you under a pair of bridges and onto the main climb. This is the toughest part of the “out”, a 1km-long stretch that tops out at that 82m-high point. I usually stick to the big chain ring; a 53-23 gets you there but it hurts. It’s easy in the small ring but the speeds suffer accordingly. Just as your lungs are about to burst on the 9 percent section, a short false flat provides some respite and the deep gulps of air necessary to crest the peak. From there it rolls and twists for another kilometre and it’s fast but it’s about this time that you have to keep a lookout for the monkeys. Yup, I said monkeys.

They sometimes run, but they don’t hide
Large troops of long-tailed macaques live in the forest that RRR cuts through and they’re out looking for food every day. Less frequent are sightings of huge reticulated pythons or families of wild boar. They want as much to do with cyclists as we do with them and they slide or scupper away as quickly as they appear.
That’s not the case with the monkeys. It’s against the law to feed them but some animal-lovers can’t help themselves so the simians simply sit in the middle of the road waiting. They usually move out of your way, but not until the last moment and even then by the bare minimum required to avoid a man-monkey clash. So it’s always a bit disconcerting, especially when you’re flying by the babies or an old “uncle” baring his teeth.

Friendly warning
The final 800m or so of the out is down and super fast. Brakes are applied at the last moment before curving left into a u-turn around a barrier that sits in front of a sentry box guarding the base. For obvious reasons I’ve never stopped to take a photo of the silent, stern soldiers manning the post. You’ve recovered a bit but now you’re confronted with the steep drag back up the hill; there’s nothing to do but just get on with the task. The reward for reaching the top of this canopied section is the knowledge that it’s mostly down all the way back to the start. I say mostly because just as you build up speed, another tricky little incline stops you in your tracks and the speeds inevitably drop back down into the 20s. The next obstacle is a series of four blind, downhill, chicane-like corners. RRR is mostly a quiet road, except for the morning and early evening shift changes at the military establishments, but there’s always the chance of a car or truck coming the other way so it’s up to the individual to decide what risks to take here. And being in the tropics it’s often damp.
Exiting the final corner of this stretch and you’re on that nasty opening 1km climb but of course you’re going down this time. It’s a case of into the drops and letting fly. The decline ends with a left-hander after the bridges that quickly turns into a right-hander complete with a speed bump just before it. At least going in this direction you can see any vehicles coming the other way so there’s no need to hold back. The last 500m seems flat but you just go as hard as you can until you reach a t-junction where you turn and hit the lap button on your speedo. Then you go again, or slide off home.

It’s not easy getting a monkey to pose with a bike
I’ve been to Rifle Range twice recently, once for a five-lap interval session and the other for a single flying lap on the way home from a short spin. The interval session I did was just my fourth time out on the Alize and so I was interested to see how it would perform on the short, sharp climbs, and on both the twisty and straight descending sections. The common way for a cyclist to quantify how a bike climbs is by “feel”. Well, on my first lap, the Alize certainly felt fine tearing up the two longer climbs, and the Ultegra 7600 parts performed their shifting duties in the fashion that you’d expect from Shimano’s excellent groupset. It’s on the downhill sections that I believe the aero features of the bike deliver most, though, and I found myself consistently at or over 60kph. I should have gone faster but that day I still didn’t have my full confidence back so I wasn’t coming out of the sweeping corners with the speed I would have liked. I find that after any extended time of the bike, in this case 10 weeks for me, it takes a while to regain the full mettle required to lean in and curve through corners. This was especially true on that series of four downhill twisters where I feathered the brakes each time; in the past I’ve negotiated the section without touching them.
Cyclists the world over use time-trial efforts on their favourite routes as a gauge to their fitness. While the human engine accounts for most of that speed and power, the machinery can also contribute and I think the aerodynamic Alize played it’s part in my first lap split of 12:07, which was only 22 seconds short of my PB – and I was nowhere near my fittest. My previous mark was set in October when I was on top form just a week after the three-stage Tour de Bintan.

A visit to RRR always produces a nice pattern
I took a bit of power off for the next two laps and then flew again on the fourth. I was just two seconds slower than the first effort but by now I felt like death and so clicked down into the small ring – not something you need to do very often in Singapore – for the fifth and final loop. I would have liked to have ridden another lap or two but my old body was creaking in a few places so I thought it best to get home and recover.
(One area that wasn’t hurting was my nether region. I’m really impressed with the Selle Italia SL Kit Carbonio saddle that came with the Alize. I can honestly say that this is the first time in the last six years that I’ve been able to ride a new saddle without encountering any problems downstairs. The longest stint I’ve done so far on the Alize is 172km and even on that day there wasn’t a semblance of a sore.)
I returned to RRR a week later during a short lunchtime ride, the purpose of which was to test my new Mavic Cosmic Carbone SR wheels which had just arrived. There’s nothing wrong with the Mavic Elite wheels that came with my Alize, they are great multipurpose wheels that will perform well both as training wheels and a racing set. However, as I had opted for the aerodynamic Alize rather than its Neil Pryde stablemate, the Diablo, I thought it fitting to buy an equally sleek set of rims and spokes. I’ve been riding Mavic Ksyrium SLs for the past three years so I stuck with Mavic and choose the Cosmic SRs for their alloy rims as I’ve never felt totally comfortable going downhill on carbon rims.
I was well warmed up by the time I reached RRR and so set off full-blast for my single effort. I attacked the first hill up past the gun club, and never let up until I was tearing down the final stretch to the turn.

The gun club marks the point to attack
The u-turn slowed me down considerably as it always does and that vicious slope slapped me straight in the face and saw me out of the saddle to get up and over it. A few monkeys sat at the side of the road, most completely disinterested but a few seemed to nod their approval as I churned a big gear to get into the rollers. I felt fast, really fast and negotiated the twisters with just two touches on the brakes this time but I was a bit annoyed to come out of the final corner to find a small truck in front of me just as I entered the long downhill drag. A couple of cars coming the other way meant I had to wait a few seconds before nipping out and past the disruptive truck and down into the flying tuck. When I hit the lap button at the end I was shocked to find that I’d recorded an 11:37, a full eight seconds off my best.
I had put in quite a few hours on my Alize since my previous visit to RRR but I know I still wasn’t at my best so I can only attribute the great leap forward to the combo of the bike and the wheels.

The perfect match
Neil Pryde will soon offer the Cosmic Carbone SL cousins of my SRs as an option and I’d highly recommend them, with one caveat … they don’t handle speed bumps with quite the same ease as Ksyriums or Elites.
If you ever find yourself in Singapore and fancy a challenge then look me up and I’ll take you to Rifle Range Road to test your legs. Or perhaps you’d like to try cycling round an entire country in a morning. But that’s another story.
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