Going coastal

After a week of riding circles in Stanley Park, the road went straight, up and over the Lionsgate bridge and north to Horseshoe Bay.

After a week of someone else's food, a few too many latte's and sitting listening to the particulars of AAIEP versus UCIEP membership and the vaguaries of the new SEVIS process, I just wanted to hurt myself on some hills.  Reductio ad absurdum.  My vision is reduced to a patch of road in front of me and the strain of my body against gravity.  There are hundreds of cyclists on the roads, but I'm polite and nod and move one.  I want to think and then I want to stop thinking and just exist in a suspended moment.

A fellow on a tri bike, shirtless and reeking of bravado, storms past me as I munch a muffin.  Fine, he can join my effort.  I swallow, shift and move into his slipstream, shift again and ease past up the climb.  I do the racer's head fuck and slow my breathing and smile and say a cheerful "hello!"  I shouldn't have, but I did, and he rolls another fifty feet off my right shoulder and then is completly demoralized.  Maybe it will help him learn not to pound his chest with cyclists he doesn't know.  Probably not.

I roll on to Horseshoe Bay and talk to an older woman and her husband on the climb to the Sea and Sky Highway.  I have no problem easing up and having another muffin.  Thirty miles in.  At the turn back towards Vancouver, an older fellow comes up from behind.  I slide into the draft and then we talk a bit.  He invites me up Cyprus Mountain and we suffer the 12km to the top in a huffing silence.  I feel weak now.  Sweat stings my eyes.  The bars feel hard in my grip and a slow rolling motion comes into my shoulders as I rocke back and forth on the climb.  Snow shows up on the roadside and I realize we're part of a long procession of cyclists making a pilgrimage to the top. 

What is it we believe in?