Learning to Pedal Uphill
We passed cars going 40mph, just booking it.
I grew up in Florida, the land of flatness, and I never had to deal with hills. The only “bad” things I had to deal with were old people, traffic and rain. But since moving to Ann Arbor and riding hills for the first time, I’ve begun to see a few paterns.
Every day I see someone trying to be casual climbing a hill on their bicycle. They’ll sit in their seat, pretend the climb isn’t too hard, but on the inside I know they’re dying. There’s nothing worse than pedaling slowly up a long hill.
So instead, when I see a hill I get out of my seat, stand up, and just push. Push until I’m done, and the hill is climbed. It’s much more intense, and it looks a lot harder from an outsider’s perspective. But it is the fastest, easiest way to get up a hill.
It seems like a bit of a paradox, that an intense attack would be easier than a mellow, slow climb, but that’s just the way it ends up. All that momentum keeps you going; keeps you from the thinking about giving up, or how miserable riding uphill can be. And coincidentally, the sooner the hill is climbed, the sooner you can begin that bonus we get for our hard work in hilly terrain, the descent.
The first couple times you bomb a hill, you don’t know what to expect. You’ll hold on to the brakes for dear life, and even then, you won’t trust the speed you’re descending at. But that’s just part of it. The cars, the potholes, the oncoming traffic, it all adds up, and you become hyperaware. You start to see 360 degrees around yourself, opening up all your senses, listening for cars behind you, looking for potholes in front of you, and looking for cars coming from all directions. It’s pure intensity, but a different kind than most people are used to.
More of an adaptive intensity, bombing hills is all about adapting to what comes. It may seem safer to take those hills down at the slowest speed possible, but that too loses a kind of safety. That encourages you to get distracted, to think about other things, to forget about where you are, what you’re doing. Not the best idea when you’re competing for space with 2,000 pound hunks of metal going 45mph. You want to be aware, you want to be nimble. You want to be able to adapt. You don’t want to be picking a better song on your ipod or thinking about what you’re going to be making for dinner tonight. Complacency and distraction is what gets people hit.
There is a limit, a practical limit, to how fast and how slow you can take that other side of the hill. I’ve taken it as fast as possible a few times, just to feel it, to feel completely out of control. There’s nothing scarier. But the senses get focused incredibly tight. I can see everything, I’m a hundred percent aware of every vehicle around me.
So in the past few months, I’ve learned quickly how to climb and to descend hills, and the lesson hasn’t been lost. The hills are here to teach us; about the way we choose to approach obstacles in life, and about the way we try to control the world around us.
When we’re thrown challenges, it’s best to take them head on, aggressively, and on purpose. There’s nothing to be gained by being casual about challenges, taking them on the head and pushing through them slowly. We must always be aggressive, tackling things as they come and pushing through with momentum. Otherwise, life gets miserable and everything takes forever.
And coming down a hill, we can slow down, trying to stay in complete control, and just get in the way of the traffic as it exists, or we can become a dynamic part of it. Flow in and out in an adaptive manner, or try and fit it into a kind of safety. Ironically, the more we try to slow things down and make them safer, the less safe they become. We must actively engage the world both on our bikes and off. We are always a part of traffic.
Now, when I’m riding, I no longer dread pedaling uphill. I look at hills as challenges, and in doing so, I have conquered them. I don’t fear going down routes that require long pedals, because I know it’s just a game. Turning your big problems into a game, that’s the best way I know to master life. Finding the biggest challenges, the worst routes, the ones nobody wants to pedal down, that becomes the game. And then, when it comes time to bike in groups, I can push everyone else just a little outside of their comfort zone. And that beats it all. That’s what makes us all grow, get a little bit stronger.
