Over the course of my cycling training so far, I have learned that seasoned cyclists use certain words in different ways from what most of us are used to.  For example, when one of them refers to a course as being “fun,” or “great,” this probably means that biking it will hurt like hell.  Another example: My coach, the Bumpster, spoke of a section of last Saturday’s training ride out of Novato — a ridiculously steep ascent known as the “Marshall Wall” — as “enticing.”  Now, to me coconut gelato on a hot day is “enticing”; what climbing the Marshall Wall felt like was something more akin to “grueling.”  Actually, I suspect that for the Bumpster and other super-cyclists “enticing” and “grueling” go together quite naturally, whereas “easy” would be a turnoff.  And amazingly, I’m starting to feel the same way.  Starting to.  I still really, really like “easy,” but there’s definitely something gratifying about pushing through challenging terrain.  And even though the gratification is mostly in retrospect, often from the vantage point of a bathtub filled with hot water and Epsom salts, some of it is there even at the time of the struggle.  Or maybe it isn’t, and I’m just thinking that because it already happened and I’ve mostly recovered.  Perhaps cycling history would come out differently if it were written at mile 31, and were dictated by your quads.

At one of our “SAG” stops (where blessed volunteers dole out food and drink to all the training cyclists), a guy who seemed to be in tip-top shape pulled his bike over for a few minutes to chat with us.  When told of the route we were biking, he expressed approval: “Ah, yes — the lollipop.  It’s a great route!”  And indeed, when I later uploaded the ride from my bike-computer thingie, it mapped out as something like a lollipop.  (See below.)  At that moment, my legs were screaming obscenities at me — but yeah, even then there was something “great” about the experience.  It was a beautiful day in Marin (is that a redundancy?), and I was pretty much keeping up with my remarkable teammates, even though there had been times when I’d kept going by focusing only on the next pedal stroke, over and over — because to look farther ahead was an enticement to think, I can’t do it.  (Maybe that’s why the Bumpster called it “enticing”?)  And you know something?  I couldn’t do it: that course was too hard for me to complete — and yet I did complete it.  And when you do something you couldn’t do, even once, it makes you think that maybe you could do something else you couldn’t do.  And then (maybe) you’re hooked.

In any case, I plan to keep going — through all the “fun,” “great” courses that they throw at us on the way to the enticing Solvang Century on March 10.  Just don’t ask me how I’m feeling when I’m in the middle of a really difficult climb, or I might reply with some less positive-sounding adjectives.

You can join the fight against blood cancers by making a contribution on my TNT fundraising page.