Cycling is a funny sport. Funny not so much in the way that it’s hilarious; it’s funny in the sense that suffering is a badge of honor. 
Greg LeMond once said, “It never gets easier, you just go faster.”
I moved to Seattle a few months before Michelle did. The first weekend I was here with a bike, I headed down a route that I’d driven with the car and veered off onto a road that looked “interesting”. (To cyclists, “interesting” means steep.) It was a one-way street (the wrong way) heading up Queen Anne. I figured, “one-way-street, schmone-way-schtreet”. As it turns out, this isn’t a one-way street because it’s better for the flow of traffic. It’s a one-way street because if a car tries to drive up it in wet conditions (this happens in Seattle more than you’d think), it will spin out and not make it up the hill. It’s somewhere around the 35% mark. Traffic is allowed down, but not up. When I drove down it in my car, my bumper scraped the road as I reached but bottom. I haven’t ridden it since, but it’s the only hill I’ve ever ridden a bike up where, when I got to the top, 2.2 km later, I got off my bike and laid in a stranger’s front yard for a while.
The point is, I will ride it again. That’s because cyclists love to hurt. A friend of mine turned Pro for Jelly Belly a few years back and at one point I was talking to him and I said, “It’s hard to attack when you hurt so much.” His response was, “It doesn’t matter how much you hurt. You just have to go harder.”
I think at a primordial level, cycling is about the locus of control. In Seattle, people never, EVER jay-walk. But it’s one of the most innovative cities in the world, which means we have innovative thinkers who don’t follow the “rules” (you can’t be innovative if you follow the rules. Einstein said something about this.) Obeying the law and breaking rules are not mutually-exclusive. It’s about the ability to choose.
Cyclists love to suffer because they choose to suffer. Because it challenges your mind. As Jens Voigt – my all-time favorite cyclist – says, “When you go hard, your body says, ‘STOP!’ and your mind says, ‘BODY, SHUT UP!’ And, sometimes it works! And then you GO!”
Cycling is about the glory of suffering, which is something few other sports can say. The men and women that race the Tours de France (yes, there’s a women’s race and no, they don’t play it on Versus, and yes, it’s every bit as challenging and exciting as the men’s race) suffer for 21 days, 6 hours a day, over the most challenging terrain and awful weather you can imagine – and they race hard. Cyclists don’t refer to their legs and “their legs”. Cyclists refer to “the legs” as though they are a separate entity from themselves. Something to tame but not to control. We can control our mind, but we can not control our legs.
Cycling folklore speaks of “The Man With the Hammer”. He is a man who lurks around any corner and will unexpectedly bang you on the neck with his hammer. He will cause you to go from smoothly spinning your pedals to pedaling squares and putting your bike in “reverse”. The Man With the Hammer strikes when your mind takes more from legs than your body can provide.
Most endurance sports refer to this as “bonking” but in cycling this is out of your control. For a sport that is centered around forcing your body through suffering unlike any other sport, this an interesting paradox. Cyclists can avoid him temporarily, but all cyclist are hit by him at one point or another in their careers. Eddy Merckx on the climb to Pra-Loup when he lost the Yellow Jersey to Bernard Thevenet. Bernard Hinault when he lost the Yellow Jersy to Greg Lemond at Serre Chevalier. Lance Armstrong when he nearly lost the 2000 Tour on the Col de la Joux-Plane.
So, next year, when the weather is warm and the roads are dry, and when my morale is high, I will ride up the 35% ramps of 4th Street to the top of Queen Anne and I will not climb off my bike at the top and rest in a stranger’s yard because – I am quite certain – the Man With The Hammer will be waiting on another hill. The next hill.
