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| The hill to my house |
I went on a ride with Fowler on Sunday. The stated goal was
a short ride punctuated by eyeball-bulging efforts in an attempt to set new
personal records (PRs) on short stretches of road that we had done before. We
use a GPS -based program called Strava that tracks these stretches of roads and
calls them segments. It was great. I’d like to tell you about it.
It started with Fowler rolling up to my house, breathing
hard from the effort of trying to set PRs on the segments between his house and
my house. We took off, dropped off my hill and then down 6th street,
Folwer leading. He tucked in on the descent, squeezing every bit of free speed
he could. Like a roller coaster, the street drops and drops until it pulls
upward. The free speed vanishes, and gravity’s hand, so friendly the moment
before, begins to push you backward.
We leaned into the hill. Spun our legs. I felt my body
resist the exercise. There is always this war at the beginning of a ride. My
mind tells my body that riding is fun and riding hard is more fun. My body
whines petulantly like a sleep deprived teenager being roused from bed.
Sometimes the mind wins. Sometimes the body. I never know which it will be
until I roll the dice.
We wound through the side streets of downtown Bremerton
toward the segment I wanted to PR.
“I’ll be the rabbit. Give me five seconds or so and see if
you can chase me down,” Fowler said as we rolled to the foot of the hill.
Every cyclist knows what “the rabbit” is. Having a cyclist
up the road from you, a rabbit to chase, is a powerful mental boost. To see the
rabbit is to know the urge to chase, to overcome, to win. It is the bellows to
the fire of competition hidden beneath the layers of civility we wear.
Fowler stomped on his pedals and began to fly up the hill.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. The distance between us stretched. Four
seconds. Could I close that distance before the top of the hill? Five seconds.
Go. Go. Go. Go.
I spun my pedals as fast as I could. One hundred RPMs. One hundred
and ten. I clicked through the gears. Each click made the pedals feel heavier.
But each click made the gap close faster. I kept clicking and spinning until
that gap began to grow again. The pedals were too heavy. I couldn’t hold the
cadence. I clicked down, leaned forward over my stem, and spun and spun and
spun. The gap shrunk. Smaller and smaller. But the top of the hill was closer
to. So close.
I clicked into a harder gear, stood, sprinted. I passed him as
we crested top of the hill. We’ll call it a tie.
A cup of coffee and a few small hills ridden side by side
later, we rolled to the base of 1st street off Navy Yard Highway.
The segment is called the 1st street wall for a good reason. It is
short, only a few tenths of a mile, but it has pitches over 20%. It is the kind
of hill that makes you feel like your car may tip over backwards as you drive
up.
We start side by side, but I pull away as the road pitches
upwards. I feel heavy, like I’m riding with weights on my bike and on my legs.
Like I’m riding through sand. I try to spin. To hold a high cadence, to force
my legs to spin the cranks one hundred circles per minute. But they refuse. The
road pitches up again, so I stand. I grab the handle bars, row the bike. The
climb becomes a full body exercise. As I push down with my legs, I pull up with
my arms. My lungs burn. My stomach writhes. I am dying. But the bike is moving
forward. At least I’m dying in motion.
We crest the hill, and the relief is overwhelming. I ride in
small circles at the top of the hill, my head slumped between my shoulders,
sweat pouring down my back. The plan is to go down the backside of 1st
street and then go immediately up Dora, another 20% effort. I grimace at the
thought.
Half of bike riding is trying to find graceful ways to avoid
doing something hard. The other half is not letting your friends talk their way
out of those hard things. Dora after the 1st street wall sounds
great while you’re sipping coffee. It sounds suicidal at the top of 1st
street wall. I did not want to ride up Dora. I cannot express with words
suitable for public consumption how much I did not want to go up Dora. So I
tried to ask to skip Dora without actually asking to skip Dora.
“Dora then?” I asked, hoping my inflection was accurate
enough to add, “we should totally skip Dora as it is a stupid thing to do and
will likely end with our deaths due to heart explosion,” without saying those
words.
“That’s the plan,” Fowler said with his inflection accurate
enough to add, “Suck it up, Nancy,” without saying those words.
We road up Dora. Actually, that’s not accurate. Fowler road
up Dora. I had a wonderful view of it. He pulled away smoothly, dancing on the
pedals. He made the 20% grade look like nothing but a minor inconvenience. I,
on the other hand, road up Dora in the manner of a medieval monk flagellating himself.
I lurched against the pedals, sweated, and grunted inch by inch up the hill. It
felt like I was powering my bicycle with human suffering. My suffering. As if
the only thing that would cause the pedals to turn over again was to channel
hurt into motion. So that is what I did. I flopped and grunted and hurt-powered
myself up that blasted hill. When I reached the top, I found Fowler nicely
rested. I was somewhat surprised he had not visibly aged in the eternity it
took me to finish. Nations have risen and fallen in less time than I rode that
short hill.
I’ve done a lot of riding this year. Lots of long rides.
Lots of steady effort. But destroying myself on that ten-ish-mile ride with one
of my best friends, chasing the rabbit, and getting dropped like a brick was
one of the most fun rides I can remember this year. Cycling is a weird sport. I
think I love it.
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