It’s a familiar route for me, but its features are made new by the changing seasons. I turn out of my neighborhood and spin my legs up, noting how the cooler temperature makes the rollers on the first road seem a little less fun. Going up, my legs complain that the cold makes it harder for them to put out power. Going down, the crisp air elicits tears from my eyes. We’re in that limbo state of the fall, where it’s not quite cool enough to break out cold weather gear, but not really warm enough to go out dressed for summer.
Down the Powell Road hill, with its patchwork of aging and crumbling pavement, I wonder what damage another winter will do to the descent. I wonder if they’ll widen it when they repave, and make it a little safer for the handful of cyclists that know about and train on this hill.
I dogleg across Rip Rap Road, and I wonder for the hundredth time how it came to that name. The story belongs to another forgotten local history, I suspect. I pick up the bike path heading south, finally getting warm as my legs come back to work on the level pavement. How drastically different this ride is from my first venture on this route, when I was dripping sweat onto the top tube and wobbling my way around, still getting used to skinny tires and steep geometry. Now my handling is surer, but the weather is a photographic negative of the picture in my mind. Brilliant blue skies and searing sunshine are replaced by the browns and grays of a Midwestern autumn. The contrast of the whole experience is so stark that I can scarcely believe it’s the same path.
The cornfields are in their final glory, still astonishingly tall from the wettest spring in recent memory, but browned and ready for harvest. The ears point downward, displaying the exhaustion of nature after a summer spent growing and shining and working as hard as ever.
I too am exhausted. My body is a collection of minor injuries, of bumps and bruises and scrapes, of aching joints and sore muscles. All natural things need rest, and I am no exception. My season has been full of trials and triumphs, of training and racing, but there is a cost, and it will be paid soon by a change of pace in a short off-season. The kid in me wants summer never to end, but I must also contend with my inner old man, and he is more than ready for a break. I’ll stretch out the season as long as I can, racing until there aren’t any races, but after this, my second season of hitting it hard, I’ll be relieved when it’s over. At least for a little while.
All of this takes the edge off my normal aggression. I’m not chasing segment records today, not trying to have my best ride ever, as I normally would. I’ve read that there are physiological advantages to not hammering every ride, but it’s a theory I haven’t spent many miles exploring. Inside, I’m still the buck-toothed kid with the comically large ears, roaring down the sidewalk on my black and gold, hand-me-down BMX, yelling for my older brother to time me. Every time I’m on a bicycle, I just want to see how fast I can go, but not today. Today I am smelling the autumnal breeze, taking in the sunbursts through the broken clouds, and riding as easily as I like.
I approach the secret woods, a small patch of forest in the middle of the city that seems to have been unmolested by the centuries of progress. The fallen leaves are thick on the pavement, and they crunch under my tires like applause from a small crowd of onlookers. It sounds as if nature herself is approving of my season spent in the saddle and outside, breathing in the fresh air and soaking up sunshine as a glutton. I have persevered through the best and worst of nature this year, and here I am asking for more still.
The path winds along the Great Miami, the biggest of the five rivers that converge at the heart of my town. The rivers, too, have changed. I’ve spent so many hours riding beside them this year that I feel I’ve come to know them. The raging torrents of spring, fueled by the rains and snow-melt, overflowed their banks downtown and submerged the bike path for miles. These gave way to full and strong summer flows, but a dry spell in the late summer reduced them to streams that barely seemed to move. Now they are alive again, reinvigorated by recent days of soaking rain and thundering over the low dams north of the city.
I cross a bridge, wind through two parks, and cross another, turning East, for home. I’m running alongside the Mad River now, and with the wind at my back, I can’t help but push up the speed a little. The increased pace breaks through the reverie of the previous dozen miles, and I’m excited again, back to being the kid on his bike. I zip past the Air Force Museum with my hands in the drops and charge up the levy at Huffman, resting across the top of the dam before tucking in to go down the other side.
I’ve traversed this circuit backwards and forwards more times this year than I can count. Run clockwise, the climb back to my neighborhood is long and gradual, save for the punctuation of the Powell Road hill. Counterclockwise, as I rode it today, nearly all of the work is saved for the end of the ride. It strikes me that these alternatives are not unlike life itself, in which we are often faced with the choice of short and steep, or long and grueling. I’ve found it’s best to prepare for both.
There’s one last climb between me and home, a 10%, 1/4 mile jump from the river basin that used to destroy me. But I’m smarter now, and stronger, and I attack the hill with a grin. I stand in the pedals as I feel gravity pushing back, and I focus on the top of the hill and pound. My lungs are screaming, my heart threatens to beat out of my chest, but my legs churn on the pedals anyway, and I reach the top still standing. Another dragon slain, to add to the pile I’ve accumulated this season. If it ended tomorrow, I’d be satisfied. But I don’t plan to let it.
