Like most cyclists, I favor smooth flat roads free of debris and annoying traffic. Throw in some sweeping downhill grades and a tailwind and riding a bike is nothing but enjoyable. Riding 1000 miles from Washington to Montana in 2020 gave me no assurances that this would be my experience. Along the way I did experience some pretty sweet stretches of asphalt though. Cruising through the Columbia River Gorge with a 20-30 mph sustained tailwind was sublime. Climbing a hill to greet the sun on a cloudless, calm morning in the desert is truly awe inspiring. But it wasn’t always that way. Some days the wind blew…the wrong way…and it sucked. Sucked the breath from my lungs, the strength from my legs and the resolve from my heart. Some days I had to choose between broken glass and bloated road kill on the shoulder and tandem FEDEX trucks in the inside lane. Some days there were no shoulders, just narrow country roads with tired hay truck drivers and (based on what I could tell by their driving skill) drunk drivers in 4×4’s hauling obscenely large boats. Some days the road disappeared altogether and was replaced with deep soft sand and sagebrush. 

Every road has something to teach you. On one particular stretch near the east end of the Columbia Gorge, I was overcome with joy at the beauty that was unfolding in front of me. It helped that I had a tailwind on a long downhill stretch with the river on my left and a giant cliff on my right sheltering me from the near 100 degree heat. But I felt gratitude. And I said so…to myself, and I think God heard me. Another stretch of pavement taught me how to focus. The road was narrow and heavily traveled by large trucks. The shoulder was marginal at best and littered with rocks, some the size of softballs. For what seemed hours, I slalomed through the debris on the shoulder and when I couldn’t avoid it, swerved out into the lane between approaching vehicles. On another particularly difficult day, the road provided headwinds so strong that trees were coming down across the road as I passed by. 

I think the most valuable thing I learned traversing all these different roads was to simply take what the road gave me. If it was a tailwind and a long downhill, I smiled and let gravity do the work. If it was 4 mile climb in 100 degree heat, I drank a lot of water, found a gear that kept me moving forward and leaned into the struggle. 

Mind you, I didn’t always approach the challenge this way. Early on, I tried to conquer every hill by standing out of the saddle and grinding as hard and fast as I could, but some hills are simply too long, some winds are just too strong to sustain that kind of effort. That doesn’t mean you can’t conquer the hill, but you have to be willing to slow down, settle in for a long struggle, find a rhythm. When I did that, I learned that stroke by pedal stroke I could climb any hill. I really did. Some hills were short; maybe a couple hundred yards. Others were longer; a mile, 5 miles. The toughest was 99 miles. But I learned to take what the road gave me and I made it.