Going up?

Why is one subset of cycling enamored with climbing, when most of the rest of the bike riding world avoids it? Some folks are granted with what is known as "climbers’ bodies", and that might explain it. Even though I am small, I don't know that I have a climbers body and yet I still love climbing. What explains that? I at least know where my climber’s body went. It’s directly south or, more precisely, beneath. Like a miner trapped underground with unlimited oxygen and food, it is safe and recoverable but not without some excavation---especially since I have begun to live in places which have seasons.

Some who weren’t born climbers are nevertheless drawn to ascending. They pretend by doing. If an imitator imitates long enough she stands a good chance of becoming what she pretends to be. Why do I love climbing? A flat and featureless road does not talk back to me. I have a conversation with a road that climbs and hairpins and pitches and switches back on itself. It talks with its hands, its knees and elbows. It shows me its ridged back, and its torso, with its depressions and arches. It pushes me to my limits more than anything else I have ever challenged myself with.

As it rises in elevation a road undergoes costume changes like an actor in a community playhouse. A typical climb I might ride is clothed in desert greasewood and creasote bush. After Act I it ducks behind a curtain to emerge with a cover of juniper and pinyon pine. The higher I ride up mountains like this the more likely I’ll see incense cedar, white fir and jeffrey pine, and perhaps western juniper jutting out of granite — if the latitude is sufficiently northern — the oldest of these craggy trees born before Christ.

If the road’s elevation is sufficient the mighty yellow pines become sparse, replaced by red fir and smaller treeline pines like the limber and the lodgepole. I might climb through quaking aspen stands, or groves of giant sequoia. As you see, these roads have a lot to say — in fact they’re downright chatty.

That’s why I find climbing interesting. But it’s also challenging. Facing that challenge is good, but facing it in style is better. So today I started the excavating process of digging in and looking for my form. Not to be a fast climber. Just to be a strong enough climber to get over all those passes so I can listen to the chatty roads I love to explore. When I am in form...I chat right back---even sing. Yes. 70 degrees and sunshine. Spring seems to have sprung in the high desert.

Happy Easter!