Vol. 93 - I Let the Mountain Win

But at least I can pick up my little girl.

I was about 75-miles into a planned 150-mile gravel bike race I entered this past weekend when everything in my periphery went blurry.

I unclipped my shoes and stepped off my bike to cross a small creek, instantly realizing I couldn’t stand up straight. My back was completely seized and any movement shot searing pain throughout my entire body. Up until that point, I was cruising. In fact, I was one mile-per-hour over my target pace for the day. But this pain came out of nowhere, like a bolt of lightning.

And, at that moment, I had a decision to make: go forward, grit my teeth, and suffer for the next 75 miles, just to say I finished. Or call it a day and head back home to Emily, our kids, and a few gooey gallons of Icy Hot.

A few years ago, the decision would have been simple: I would have finished the race, even if it meant crawling across the finish line. It also meant I would likely spend the next three or four days in agonizing pain as my back, ever the problem, healed.

I’m not a person who quits things I start. If there’s one indelible trait I’m most thankful for my parents instilling in me (and one I’ll do my best to instill in my children), it’s the fact that I rarely give up. It’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to enjoy a modicum of success in a variety of professional endeavors in my life. And because of that trait, I’m usually able to endure a rather unhealthy amount of physical unease.

“Discomfort never killed anyone.” - Marcus Aurelius

I’m paraphrasing.

But these days, things are different. These days, I can’t come home and tell Emily that I need three or four days to be horizontal. I can’t tell my son that we can’t go for a bike ride because daddy hurt himself trying to finish a race that, in the grand scheme of things, is meaningless. I can’t say that I’m unable to pick up our daughter until Wednesday because nothing upsets me more than giving up and I had to finish the damn race.

And it was that very idea—of not being able to hold my kid for a few days—that made my decision then and there at the edge of the creek. My day was done.

But if I’m being honest (which, after all, is the backbone of this newsletter), I’m still pissed about it, three days later. Furious, in fact, that I have to wait another to year to go back and try it again.

After all, I let the mountain win.

Never let the mountain win.

It’s a motto I repeat to my son often and one that has become our shared mantra.

Sometimes the mountain of mine and my son’s mantra isn’t a mountain at all. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes it’s an emotion that we can’t seem to overcome. Sometimes it’s sadness. Sometimes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a mountain. Or, in my son’s case, a hill.

He’s been riding a two-wheeled bike since he was two-and-a-half-years-old. He was an ace on the balance bike before he simply sat on some little girl’s bike at the neighborhood park and rode off in the direction of a nearby street one day. After I caught him and my breath, I asked who taught him how to ride. We took a few stabs at it in the months leading up to his first solo ride but nothing stuck. He wasn’t interested and I wasn’t going to push him too hard. After all, he was only two.

“You taught me, daddy,” he said.

I most certainly did not.

Since then, he’s been inseparable from his bike. He loves to ride. We do five-, eight-, ten-mile off-road rides every Tuesday during the warm months. Late last year, we rode fourteen-miles around the cart paths of the golf course near our neighborhood, which has been closed for the last year for a total renovation. He was inconsolable when I told him we had to go home for dinner.

Whenever he finds himself at the precipice of a challenging section, I remind him that he can never let the mountain win.

Two summers ago, when he was four-and-a-half, he did his biggest ride; eighteen-miles along the shores of Lake Annecy, high in the French Alps.

The following morning, I rode a pair of climbs that have been featured in several Tours de France: the 3,813-foot Col de la Forclaz, which has been climbed seven times by Le Tour, and the Col du Marais, which, at 2,675 feet, Tour organizers don’t consider a big enough climb to put into one of its five mountain categories.

Never let the mountain win

I repeated it to myself often as I climbed those mountains, whenever I felt the pang in my gut telling me to just stop, that there was no reason to be riding my bike up this mountain.

Never let the mountain win    

I repeated it again this summer, as I climbed the hors categorie Col de Joux Plane’s 5,547 feet (you should click that link and see what hors categorie means). How could I come down the mountain and face my son, who I refuse to accept quitting from? How could I tell him that I let the mountain win?

Never let the mountain win.

The mountain is there. The mountain will always be there. The mountain doesn’t care that I’m significantly bigger than most cyclists. The mountain doesn’t care that I didn’t arm myself with the right gearing. That mountain doesn’t care that I’m forty-one-years-old. The mountain doesn’t care that I’m nothing special on the bike; a slightly above-average recreational rider with a preternatural capacity for suffering. There’s the bottom and there’s the top. And in the middle, that’s where all of that pain lives. That’s where the mountain wants you to quit.

Never let the mountain win.  

Sometimes, the mountain of our motto isn’t a mountain. Sometimes it’s an aching back that’s been nagging me for the last two decades.

As soon as I got home, my son asked me whether I won the race. I reminded him that I don’t race for wins much these days. I race to finish, to challenge myself, to beat the mountain, whatever the mountain is.

I was honest with him, as I always try to be, and told him that not only did I not win, I didn’t even finish. I told him about my back and about how much it pained me to give up but that sometimes, rarely, there’s no other option but to stop, so long as you promise yourself you’ll try again next time.

I told him that just because the mountain won this weekend, it won’t beat me next time. And if it does, it won’t beat me the time after that.

I told him that, I guess, once in a while, it’s okay to let the mountain win. But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.