You can't just judge how suitable a course may be purely by the elevation figure.
Compare Steve's ride today (round the bowl that has a 10m climb) to various other (extreme) options that have the same distance and elevation gain.
Imagine a 252.6km ride that starts off with a 25.22km climb that's a nasty 10%, then the remaining distance is very slightly downhill (-1%). That'd be horrible for his style of riding (trying to keep the HR down).
Or a ride that climbs at about 1% the 2522m over the course of ~230km and then has a final 25.22km 10% descent. That might be nicer with the free miles at the end, but it would require more energy to be expended than riding around the bowl[1].
Steve's now tried it on a windless day and can work out whether he's better off going somewhere really flat (Goole/Boston/etc), whether he should use the Bowl, or just head out on a normal ride on the open roads that may contain hills.
The shorter day has also meant an earlier start for today, which is good.
1. Very small rises (under 3m) can be climbed purely by freewheeling up them (30kph will allow you to freewheel up a 3.5m rise until you come to a halt) and you'll reclaim most of the lost speed on the subsequent descent. (Losses to rolling resistance are the same either way, for air resistance it's better to travel at a constant speed rather than periods of being slow then fast). Big long descents are bad as you lose much more energy to air resistance and there's a limit to how fast you can go (so you're not efficiently converting anywhere near a good percentage of the gravitational potential energy you had back into kinetic energy.) Anyway, all of the physics is a bit meaningless. It will mostly depend on whether Steve looks at the figures and decides whether 250km here was easier/better than being out on the open roads.