50,000 feet

I was soaking wet and starting to shiver in a way I couldn't exactly control. Darkness had fallen, but my front tire was still slicing through the roadside evidence of the sleet storm going on around me. I might’ve headed home before dark, except that my phone—or my app, maybe my mind?—had betrayed me, and I'd just discovered that the last three climbs up the hill didn't count. Should I give up for today? Give up for the year?

Let me back up. Ever since I first got a smart phone, I've used an app called Strava to record my bike rides. It provides a record of where I've been and when, and lets me "race" strangers on segments of road or trail by using the phone’s GPS. And normally, I glance quickly at the numbers it produces, but don't spend too much time geeking out over them. Not enough that I would really change my riding to accomodate them in any way.

But on Sunday, I realized that I was at about 48,000 feet of climbing for the year, and in that day's ride, I'd recorded around 500. Well, that was enough to trigger the OCD in me. If I put forth an effort, I could make it to 50,000 feet for the year: a nice, even, eminently quantifiable milestone. The only other time I'd even noticed this number was a few years ago, and I very narrowly made 10,000 that year. This would be a real “upgrade.”

The problem was, only 2 days remained in 2019.  And my holiday vacation from work was ending. Even more concerning was the fact that a major winter storm was forecast for Monday. But none of the weather predictions quite agreed where it would snow, where it would rain, and who would get sleet. Anything could happen.

That's why yesterday afternoon, I returned to the seminary I attended in the mid-nineties, and to the disbelief—in my mind, anyway—of the few international students still on campus during the week after Christmas, I climbed the big hill the school sits on. Again. And again. And again.

After the realization that I’d lost some data (never even recorded it, actually), I didn’t take anything for granted. After each trip up, I saved the “ride,” and started another. It brought out a different side of me as a rider. Usually, I try to come up with creative titles for my rides. Now it was “Ice Storm 1,” “Ice Storm 2,” “Ice3,” “Ice4,” and similarly cryptic abbreviations (I did go back and rename some of them later).  After finally passing the 49,000 foot barrier, I gave up the ghost for the night. I wasn’t going to force myself to do anymore—and I’m not sure I could have.

But with some trepidation, I headed out again the next day after work. I’m on the job until 3:30, and on the last day of the year, it gets dark not long after that. If the day before, I’d been pure science, on the 31^st, I was all business. I needed around 1,000 feet. Thankfully, the day had melted all the sleet and left the road mostly dry. I took off the little pack I carry with an extra tube and pump. Unnecessary weight. I loosened the brakes to ensure as little friction as possible (and looking back, I should have put on tires with less tread, as well). And I got to work. I hadn’t really been on a pleasure cruise the day before, either, but that night I took the shortest way I could back to the proper hill. The long, gradually climbing flat section was out. Up the hill, stop long enough to quit breathing hard, back down, and get climbing again. I believe I passed one student three times as he ascended the last stretch of sidewalk that climbs directly up the hill (the road has one curve, anyway), but I’m not sure if that was possible.  I was trying not to think too much that day, but I did notice one thing before I quit—I had set a personal record on the climb. Glancing at the phone just now, I notice that I’m only 274^th out of 340 total people who’ve tracked their climbs—well under the top 50%. But it’s still the best effort I’ve ever done. (On the other hand, I’m also tied with beloved Red Bull athlete and former national cyclocross champion Tim Johnson, so that’s gotta be worth something.)

I say I wasn’t thinking, but on another level, it was inevitable, and the emptiness and darkness of the campus didn’t help. I wrote earlier in the fall about returning to the campus with an old friend, but students had been all around us, then. Now I was pretty much alone with my memories. Of the times I’d climbed that hill for meals, for classes. With my head full of ancient Greek or Hebrew, prepared for a test and trying not to forget anything. Carrying a precious paper that I’d spent all night preparing. (Though it was toward the end of those days, there was not yet any e-mailing of papers back then.) Each lap I glanced over to the former poolhouse where I’d gone swimming on occasion. Now the pool’s been filled with concrete.

The first night, as I watched the small John Deere tractors plowing the sidewalks, I thought of my years on the seminary’s Grounds Crew, and how crazy I would sound if I stopped one of them to tell them  about the April day back in 1996 or so when we’d gotten nearly a foot of snow in one day, and I’d spent the day filling up what looked like those same machines with gas again and again, in between shoveling out the area in front of the garage doors so they could pull in (and the boss could drive to Dunkin Donuts,) then finally trudging up the stairs of the same building, exhausted. Students don’t live in Pilgrim Hall anymore.

So as I wrestled with these melancholy ghosts (it didn’t help that we were approaching the end of another decade), I did my best to turn my frustration about growing older into watts. Burn it all up and put it into the wheels, like an old-time freight train. When I thought I’d made enough trips at last, I stopped the tracker, prepared to glance at my triumphant statistics. Uncharacteristically, I even named the ride before looking at the figures: “Mountaintop Experience.” But I was an English major. My calculations were wrong. Yearly feet climbed: 49,996. Oh, for Pete’s sake! I started another ride, down the small incline I rested at the top of. Swiveled around, and climbed back up. Only to find that the phone had never started recording. I still needed to make one more effort. This time, I left no more room for chance. I didn’t move until I was certain it was recording. Went the whole way back down to the curve in the road, and back up to the same spot under a streetlight. At last.