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| Honey Springs Road Picture from Google maps |
There is a road outside San Diego call Honey Springs. It is not particularly scenic. It has the rugged desert charm that one expects
from inland southern California, but it does not have more or less of that charm than any other road in the region. What Honey Springs lacks in
scenery or ambiance, it compensates for in length and difficulty. Spurred on by
stories of heroic suffering by my friends,
The thermometer on the car’s dash read 105 degrees when I
parked at the base of the climb. This, of course, had to be some fluke of the
thermometer placement. I stepped outside the car and confirmed that it was hot
enough for the world to burst into flame at the merest hint of a spark. I
started riding anyway. This would prove to be a mistake.
It all started well enough. The bike rolled, the hill rose,
I pedaled. All was as it should be. Well, as it should be if I were looking to
ride my bicycle in an oven. The climb can best be thought of as a series of
climbs connected by less steep climbs. I realize that sounds like I just said, “It’s
a climb with climbs and more climbs,” but the steepness of the climbs and the
length of those steep sections is extremely important.
During the steeper sections, I felt my heart rate go from
cool jazz tempo to over enthusiastic marching band snare drummer. Which is to
say that I found myself repeatedly riding in what cyclists call, “the red,”
that dangerous zone where you push yourself so far that your body just calls it
quits on this whole cycling thing. This is where you see people vomit or weave
drunkenly on their bikes or simply stop riding and sit at the side of the road
in quiet contemplation of all their life’s mistakes.
I forced myself through the hard sections, feeling that it
was entirely possible that I was melting and leaving a trail of me along the
road behind me like some ill-fated ice cream cone. I wondered how long there
would be enough of me to actually ride the bike. Would someone find the bike next
to cycling clothes and an unidentifiable pool of ex-human goo? It seemed
likely. But then the road would level, and going on seemed possible again. But
with each gradient spike, I knew that my chances of finishing were diminishing.
I was losing the fight against gravity.
Roughly four miles into my seven-mile trek, I could not go on. I yanked on the
handlebars and pointed the bike down the hill. The heat and the hill were
winning, had won. I just wanted to feel the coolness of a breeze on my skin,
that blessed sensation of the heat being washed away. It was an all-consuming
desire.
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| Pictured: A map of failure |
Descending in 100 degree heat is not cooling. It is
convection cooking. I baked as I flew. I did not know if that was preferable to
the melting or not. They were both unpleasant. But at least I didn’t feel like
throwing up anymore. You take what you can get in these situations.
I sat in my rental car for an unknown period of time. During
that time, I listened to the roar of the AC and felt the racing drumbeat of my
heart slow and slow and slow until it was slow enough that my body no longer
felt like a malfunctioning machine.
I do not like failure. And I had, by all measures, failed to
climb the hill I set out to climb. The heat and the hill were too formidable
for me. They beat me. Cowed me. Humbled me.
Several days later, spurred on by the prodding of my friends
and the thermometer reading a cool 90 degrees, I tried again.
It started well. I was confident. I was hydrated. It was
dramatically cooler. The first mile passed smoothly. I
met each kick, each spike in gradient, with a smile. I knew that they didn’t
last. That they were always followed by an easier section. I passed where I quit the first time. I nodded as I rode by,
as if to say, “I see you, failure. We won’t be spending any time together
today.”
It was then that I found that I quit last time before the
climb got hard. It pitched upward and stayed there, stayed steep. The 90 degree
heat, so insignificant before, became consuming. I could feel the sun beating
down on my back, threatening to melt me again. I pedaled on. The climb passed
though sections that were shaded by the hills. I slowed in those sections,
tried to absorb the coolness, willed it to strip away the heat that clung to me.
There comes a point on any hard climb were the bargaining
starts. Your body begs you to quit, and you start lying to yourself. I can quit
when I get to that corner. That’s not that far. When that corner comes and
goes, you follow with another lie. That tree. I can make it to that tree. It’d
be a shame not to see that tree. I set small goals for myself, over and over
again, and I pushed through to them powered by the lie that I could quit, could
sit down, could relax if I could only just get there.
And then I saw the mileage sign I was waiting for: 19.0
miles. From where? I didn’t know. But I did know that I saw the sign for 13.0
miles sometime after I started my ride. Which
meant that I had less than a mile before the crest of the hill. Less than
a mile was doable. Who quits less than a mile from the end? Not me. I pointed
at the sign and laughed as I rolled by. Less than a mile. Easy.
I regret to say that I missed the opportunity to raise my
hands in a victory salute as I crested the hill. I crossed the apex of the
climb. I won. I did not beat the hill. I beat myself. I beat the mark I set
earlier in the week. I went farther. I finished. I did not quit. And that, that
ability to surpass the me of yesterday, is at the heart of what I love about
cycling. It is not about being faster than someone else. Thousands of people
have climbed that hill faster than me. It’s about being better than I was
yesterday.
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| Pictured: Success |
There is, at the heart of this failure/success story, a deep
theology. We are called to be like Christ. But we do not reach that goal all at
once. And we do not reach that goal in comparison to the people around us. We
reach that goal by striving every day to be just that fraction more loving, that fraction more forgiving, than we were yesterday.
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