This Sucks.

I’m nothing if not honest. And I was being quite honest when I uttered the title of this post no more than one hour ago, as I was midway through traversing the hills that overcome the landscape between my home and Mount Vernon. After about the 12th incline in as many minutes, I had had enough. My lungs were screaming, my heart thumping, Ike creaking under the weight of my weary frame. This DID suck.

But pay now or pay later, as my mother often says. Either I get through these hills now and work up to climbing them with relative ease, or I take the flat road of popularity and pay the price come race day. They don’t call it the Red HILLS Triathlon for nothing, do they?

I will say that by the time I’d gotten home, 45 minutes later (it was a 90-minute ride in all today, a makeup long bike from last week), I’d pretty much forgotten about the hills of yore. What I DID remember was the joy of the ride, of seeing everybody out and about on a sunny 50-degree January day, of watching the children and the parents and the senior citizens and the pups. I loved zooming on the downhills, loved watching the Potomac roll by, loved watching the robins bounce around a shady puddle that still had a thin layer of ice over the top. Occasionally, I would be rolling down the path and realize that it was just Ike and me, as far as the eye could see, the two of us against the world – or, actually, communing with it. And that bond with nature, with the life teeming all around me as I pedaled through with nary an ecological footprint to leave behind, is what it’s really all about, anyway.

And THAT doesn’t suck.

:)