Wheels on Ice by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO011000 SPORTS & RECREATION / Cycling, SPO019000 SPORTS & RECREATION / History, HIS036140 HISTORY / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)
Publisher: Nebraska

The Killer Hill

Andromeda Romano-Lax

It was my perfect sporting event—brief, brutal, and relatively unpopular—and I was determined to love it, as long as it didn’t kill me.

First, let me assure you, in case your wardrobe isn’t 90 percent Lycra, that this essay isn’t just about sport. It’s about an experiment that started with one activity and expanded into a larger quest to understand how we spend our time.

But it starts with cycling. It starts at the bottom of a steep hill, looking up toward a hairpin curve with trepidation.

I first decided to bike up the hill behind Anchorage’s Potter Marsh one early-summer day in 2006. The road, a favorite racing venue, rises about seven hundred feet in just under two miles, zigzagging past mansions and stunning views of Turnagain Arm.

Winners of the race climb the 7 percent–grade hill in under ten minutes, “sport” or intermediate cyclists take twelve to fourteen minutes, while novices might hyperventilate their way to the top in something under eighteen.

Ten to twenty minutes of anything: how bad could it be?

On my first attempt, garbed in sweatpants and naive optimism, I planned to give it my best and use that time as a baseline for potential improvement.

Making sure no cyclist or observer of any kind was in the vicinity, I pedaled up the hill in my lowest gear, panting and straining. I muscled my way around a tight curve, climbed again, and finally pulled into an expensive neighborhood that I assumed to be the hill’s end.

I looked at my watch, and then I spent several minutes coughing and recovering my breath, feeling if not gleeful, at least reassured: Twenty minutes, without any training. Take that!

In the victory speech my mind played on the easy ride down, I thanked the genetic heritage of my supremely fit grandfather. Not long before his death, “Papa Coach” broke his hip on an icy winter day while cycling at a steep-banked velodrome north of Chicago, leaving me to inherit his fondness for questionable training routines as well as his extremely bulky calves.

Except that when I retraced the hill a few days later, in my car, I realized I hadn’t finished the course. In fact, I’d barely started it. The road doesn’t hairpin once; it hairpins five times, for a total of six steep, straight sections, ending where the asphalt becomes gravel. I’d cycled under one-third its length and height in more time than it takes most beginners to pedal the whole thing. Turns out that without a lot of cardiovascular conditioning, bulky calves don’t do much more than hold up knee socks.

Even my Subaru resented the long, steep ride that day, nearly overheating on the drive up. Back at sea level, I felt a little grim. And—perversely—inspired as well.

Later that summer, pacing myself and taking several rests, while tolerating the fact that my heart seemed ready to break through the walls of my chest like Sigourney Weaver’s 1980s alien foe, I managed to do the entire hill in eighteen minutes.

Two weeks later I shaved another forty seconds off that time—an act of sheer will, rather than a result of training.

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