I was riding with some friends this weekend and they were discussing a serious grade somewhere here in town, something that would be pretty hard to crank up on a bike. As we’d only covered about 15 miles so far on the ride, I was up for more.

We pedaled away from the coffee shop parking lot where we’d stopped to rest and take on water.

Shortly I found my conversation with a fellow rider cut short due to being forced into the gutter by a minivan while speeding down a hill. Helpfully, the van was pacing me, so I had no choice but to stay in the gutter and hopefully not get tossed by any debris or what have you in it. Thanks for the near-death, asshole minivan. You’re sure helping matters by going slowly! Making things somewhat worse were the long plants hanging over the gutter which had an extremely unpleasant whipping effect on my right arm. It was striped red when the van finally went away.

I hate it when cars pace me. Drivers, listen up. It sucks to have to wait behind a cyclist in traffic, I know. Have you ever noticed, though, that we tend to catch up at the stop lights? What does this mean? It means we’re all getting there at pretty much the same time because lights hold you up. Sometimes when I’m running in the city I’m actually faster down the sidewalk for a series of blocks than cars due to lights. Maybe you can not roar past at three inches away, or force me into a gutter and stay beside me so I have no choice but to get whipped by plants. Thanks!

After the plant thrashing, we made a left onto a side street and the traffic was nearly nonexistant. It was nice to have a break. Everyone cranked up a hill that was pretty short, but the grade was really steep. We all paused at the top.

“OK,” a rider said “That was a warm up. This is Mary George.”

I looked at a sign. We were at an intersection and the cross street read Mary George, sure enough.

“We call it Mary Gorge,” he continued. “Get going as fast as you can or you won’t make it up the other side.”

There didn’t seem to be any traffic, so we took a left one by one and started down the hill.

It was a pretty steep hill, but even more than being steep it was in complete disrepair. Streets in Atlanta are the bastard children of a joke and a nightmare, and this street was worse than most, probably due to being in a poor area of town. When I got to the bottom I was rocking along at over 30mph. This is not that fast all things considered, but the bike was bucking like mad. I stopped trying to brake or maneuver and just held on, standing and pinching the saddle between my legs like I would on a mountain bike descent.

Shortly I came to the bottom and saw the grade ahead. It looked like a wall. At the top, riders were tacking back and forth across it like sailboats. I geared all the way down and stood up and mashed for all I was worth.

I have never had to stand up and mash in my granny gear like that, so it was a new experience. I was breathing at a rate greater than my cadence which usually annoys me whether I am cycling, running or swimming, but I was going so slowly and stomping so hard that I had no choice and didn’t care anyway.

I didn’t tack. I just rode straight up the middle. About ten feet from the top I thought “I am going to make it”, even though my lungs were like “HEY” and my legs were going “AHEM” and pretty much every other area of my body was generally pissed.

The first rider to finish saw me stomping up the hill and said “Oh!” as in “Oh, I fully expected you to be dead by now”.

So, I felt a little better about being the only rider in full kit that day, like I earned it.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 8:23 am and is filed under Snarky Invective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.