Unscared of Hills

I used to be scared of hills on my bike. I'm not anymore. So many cyclists are worried by hills, but I've finally made my peace with them, come to embrace their challenge, and even love them. The only reason I can think of is just that I've done a lot of them in the last few years.

Crossfitters like to use the word "Unscared". I like it. It's stronger than "unafraid": Being scared of something is just a notch worse than being afraid of it Maybe it's a bit better than being terrified, but "Unterrified" doesn't have the same ring to it.

So I was scared of hills. When I first started riding around here, there was this Big Hill on one of my regular rides. I always dreaded that Big Hill. I knew it was coming, steeled myself for huffing and puffing my way to the top, and was relieved when it was over.

Here's the MapMyRide.com hill profile for that ride:

That Big Hill in the middle is about 75 feet tall. I used to have to stand on my pedals to get to the top.

Here's one of the rides I did recently:

The hill you climb (twice!!) on this ride is over 3,000 feet tall. Yeah, no kidding. A 75 foot hill used to have me quaking in my bike cleats, and now I can toss off 6,000 feet of climbing in a day and still get up the next morning and go for a run.

How did I come to love hills? It's been a gradual attitude adjustment on my part. Firstly, somewhere along the way I stopped being scared of just plain old working hard. When you see a hill, you know it's going to be hard. Assuming it's not so steep that you're in danger of falling over (I have worried about that on a couple of them), the worst thing that will happen is that you will go really slow, it will be hard, and it will take a long time. That's not so very terrible, once you get used to the notion.

Secondly, I decided to prepare for the hills I would encounter in racing by doing even harder hills in training. One year I trained for a Half-Ironman that was reputed to have a 14% grade. So I went out and found a hill with a 15% grade, and went up it repeatedly. By the time I got to the race, I knew I could do it. I was Unscared.

Lastly, this year in training for the Leadman (two weeks away, but who's counting, right?) and training for last year's Ironman Coeur d'Alene, I knew I would have to do a lot of climbing in my training rides, so I've sought out the hilliest rides around, deliberately. Going out and looking for hills to do sounds crazy, but once you start embracing them, hills lose the terror factor and become your friend. I'm still not the fastest hill climber on the block, but I can do them and I'm no longer scared.

And when you get to the top, you get to look out over the universe, see down to where you started out, and know that you earned that view.

How Not to Taper

Violating all of my own rules and best interests, I played hookey on my karate class, blew off my notion of tapering this week and took advantage of the beautiful break of spring weather (in a week of pouring rain, sleet, and hail) to take my bike along the ever-lovely McKenzie river.

There was a sun shining overhead, there was not the tiniest draught of wind to be felt other than that made by the speed of my bike, the roar to my left was a rushing waterfall, the brilliant sentinels to my right were wild apple trees covered in blossoms. Orchards lay in spring green with fields decked out in emerald and all the while the river coiled and uncoiled, rushing and calming to the side of the road. Sometimes you climb way above it and look down on the rapids, sometimes it's right off of your shoulder drowning out anything else. I've ridden this road for over two decades, when I was in college its hills used to intimidate me. How amazing is it that at almost 44 years old (in two weeks!) they seem like minor bumps in the road now, to be spun up while gazing out at the scenery?

There are times when cycling fills my heart to bursting with joy and I have to yell down the hills "Wheeeeeeeeyaaaaaahhhhh!" like a crazy person. Today: such a day.

Fun on a Bike

This was posted on the Crossfit Endurance blog, and I just had to share. For anyone who loves bikes, this is just amazing. It's not the kind of biking that I do or that I could ever do (I'm way too chicken) but it's just so cool to see someone have that much control of their two-wheeled device that they can do these amazing things. Sometimes when I'm biking I feel like my bike is just an extension of my body, like it almost feels like I've grown wheels, but this guy just embodies that on a whole new level.

Enjoy!

Exactly How Much Life Insurance Does He Have Out On Me Anyway??

I live on a hill. Not a big hill (though it seems that way sometimes at the end of a long hot ride when I'm chugging upwards) but a pretty steep one, with a stop sign at the bottom. So when I start off on my daily ride and go bombing down the hill and grab my brakes a few feet from the stop sign to roll gently to a stop, imagine my surprise when my front wheel locks up and my back wheel rises off of the ground and I almost go endo, ass over teakettle.

Yes, dear considerate hubby decided to install new brakes on my bike "for my safety" but neglected to TELL ME.

Subterfuge

There are people on this earth who must be able to calmly and patiently await the attainment of their goals. The face of the Dalai Lama springs to mind, but I'm sure average every-day people like this exist as well. I've never been one of those people. Sometimes that is an advantage - the ability to push yourself beyond all reason is, obviously, a necessary attribute to training for something like an Ironman, something no really actually truly sane person would do. But often it's a disadvantage too.

Last week I was sick, I basically ran myself into the ground with some overwork and some lack of sleep thrown in for good measure and caught myself a terrible bug that's been going around. This week the sunshine came out to play and, not being able to resist its siren call (though I probably, in retrospect was not 100% well), I headed out for a nice hour and a half bike ride in the cold wintry air on Thursday. Fast forward to Friday morning and I feel like someone had taken a blow torch to my lungs. I can picture them in there all red and angry and inflamed, probably cursing the stupid brain sitting atop their body for putting them through such torment. Today I'm slightly better, but not much. So there goes my workouts for the weekend, blown up for the joy of a ride outdoors after months on the trainer in the basement.

The good news is that all of those basement trainer workouts made riding outside feel effortless and beautiful, something that couldn't describe my first season's rides in years past when my bike sat ignored in the garage all winter. So I have hope that once my lungs truly heal up (and I am NOT, NOT, NOT going to run tomorrow no matter how good I feel) and the good weather returns as it always does, I'm going to have some great early season riding ahead of me.

For now, it's back to bed with my hot tea and my cough drops.

Then...and Now

Then...when I started biking I thought I was so smooth when I could pull my water bottle out of its cage, take a drink, and replace it all without falling over.

Now... I think I'm so smooth when I can pull my cell phone out of my Bento Box, check my voicemail, and return it without breaking my aero position or losing 90 rpms.

I guess I've learned something in 20 years of biking after all...

It's a Dangerous and Beautiful World Out There

First the good news: the fall weather here has been extraordinarily beautiful, and despite the fact that my first couple of runs (after not running for a month) totally sucked, now it feels great and I knocked off a 7.5 miler this weekend pretty easily. So I'm signing up for a spring half-marathon with good confidence (barring any more injuries) that I'll have a healthy running season.

The bad news: I've had two brushes with serious danger in the last couple of days. The first, I was biking home from a volleyball game with hubby at night. He was a good hundred feet in front of me when I was passed by a car, as it turns out driven by a drunk who then proceeded to swing entirely across the bike lane, up onto the sidewalk, narrowly avoid a power pole on the sidewalk, back down onto the road and drive off. Only some very quick braking by me kept me from total annhilation. As a mom of young kids, this is the kind of thing that scares me when I get on a bicycle (especially at night).

Then yesterday while out running I was chased by a pit bull. I had to turn around and confront it (knowing that continuing to run would probably make it chase me down) and while it snapped its immense jaws in front of my face, I sternly held up a finger and said "NO! Bad Dog!", hoping fervently I was sounding like its owner, and dialing 9-1-1 with my free hand. Now I'm not one to point fingers at any one breed, after all the only dog I've ever been bit by while running was a standard poodle, but there's something about the very large and powerful jaws and teeth of a pit bull that are, well pretty darned intimidating! Fortunately, all's well that ends well. The owner turned up, the police turned up, the dog had escaped out of the owner's house by opening the front door (they lived on a busy street, so there's no way the owner wanted the dog running out into the street like that anyways). I was not eaten alive by the big doggy. But again, it makes me realize that running and biking are among the two more dangerous things you can do in this world. Skydiving, cave spelunking, underwater welding, these things have got nothing on just using our American sidewalks and bike lanes!

So I hope you all are getting to enjoy the beautiful autumn, and be safe out there!