The Curse of the Irish
Yesterday I rode up Independence Pass yesterday, with a buddy. The local's that are hard-core cyclists tell me that it's a Hors Category climb, and after tracking down the profile, I believe them. The climb gains about 4,500' over 18 miles and while I'm sure a Tour de France cyclist can do it in like 18 minutes, it took me 2.15 to get to the top.
But first a little background, and if you look closely at that background you can see a storm a-brewin'. See when I woke up that morning, I look out up the Pass and saw dark clouds coming, and not just light dark clouds, I'm talking "Something Wicked This Way Comes" dark. So I called my buddy and said, "Hey, it look pretty rough up the Pass, what do you think?" And he says, "I just checked the weather radar, its clearing up, lets go." Now, being a guy, with the guy chromosome, I'm genetically prohibited from using the logic of "but it looks bad with my actual eyes" and instead am forced to adhere to Guy Rule #267, which says you can't cancel on a sporting event without a note from your doctor, and there's a further subsection (D) that states, "When one of the guys in question is a father of a non-adult child, then the canceling party must be in an actual Emergency Room." Since both of us have small children and have been looking forward to this ride all week, 267.D was in full effect and we headed up the mountain.
Long time followers of this blog (Hi Ma!) know that long bike rides grind me up. For whatever reason, I have a hard time translating my fitness to the bike. Well this ride chewed me up. I was about half way up when I thought of that old Gaelic saying, "May the road rise to meet your feet." well, it occurred to me that this may be the Gaelic version of that Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Think about it, those crafty Celts are smiling and saying may the road rise to meet your feet as a blessing, but what they're really saying is that, "I hope your life is an uphill slog." Because what is a hill but a place where the road rises to meet your feet.* It also reminded me of that Robert Frost poem, the Road Not Taken. Every time I read that poem, and always after I don my dickie and beret, I think of a guy neck deep in quicksand, thinking to himself as he reflected on taking the less worn path, "Hmmmm, maybe this is the reason no one comes this way.
I guess the bigger question is why biking makes me a literary hack?
Anyway, 4,500' of gain dropped the mercury 20 degrees and the exact second we reached the top of the Pass, it started to rain. 6.5% grades are a slog going up, but they're lightning fast going down. Usually this is the reward, there's not much many more fun things you can do on a bike than blast down a mountain pass, staying on the back fender of a Porsche as you scream through the turns, but when its 39 out and raining, it feels like you're biking through a swarm of angry bees. We made it about half-way down when the skies really opened up so we stopped and tried to flag down a pick-up truck to take us back to town. The great thing about small western towns is that every third car is a truck, and people are more than happy to give you a lift. We actually had two offers! So we put our bikes in the bed, climbed in the back of a white crew cab and shared a ride home with a huge, wet and friendly black lab.
The kicker? My buddy turns to me and says, "This came in from Grand Junction. The radar looked ugly this morning, I just really wanted to ride." The thing is, I totally understood.
*Please note that this is not an Anti-Irishite statement. I'm invoking "Tribal Immunity" because I have Irish roots.
