Today, she said, she was going to do hill repeats. I don’t have to do them, and I don’t get judged when I beg off of something, but she asked her coach to give her some hill repeats and it was a warm day and it was time for a ride.
A hill repeat is just that. You find a hill and ride up it over and over again. Or, in today’s case, you do it 10 times. Ten times up one hill. Except the hill she wanted to climb was flooded. I’ll wait for you here to figure out how that particular topography works.
So we went up another hill, which featured ascents of 10 to 13 degrees, which is not unsubstantial. We climbed up two minutes, turned around, descended, and climbed back up two minutes again. Happily, the place where I turned around was the same spot each time. So I didn’t get more tired on the seventh, eighth or ninth repetition. I was just slow on each of them.
We had 10 hills to climb, and I felt that I could climb that joker the ninth time, keep on going, finish the rest of the hill and call it 10. But that is not what we did.
We turned around, went by that barn and made our escape by climb up an even steeper hill. There was a section with a 15-degree ascent and the hardest parts continued burning my tired legs for about half a mile. After that it was just a regular little road, and we were finally going fast-ish. When the road joined another, which was our route home, we ran across a cyclist we know. Maarten is a national-caliber triathlete and we decided we would try to catch him. We cut into his lead, but we were going from a dead stop, joining his road and he was already underway and, this part is important, he’s a national-caliber triathlete.
Later in the evening we learned that our hill repeats and all those very steep inclines might have been ambitious. The Yankee’s coach says he had something else in mind, really. He knows the roads, of course, and can see the data. He was thinking more like that road where we tried to chase down Maarten. I just looked at the profile for that segment. It tops out at 5.7 percent which, after six miles uphill felt like a launch pad.
Oh well, next time then.
This evening’s storms brought a lot of rain and wind. At one point the power browned out, came back, browned out, came back and then it finally just gave up. My solar lights experiment got their first real trial!
I picked up a few of these at the hardware store for about five bucks a few months back. I keep them on a windowsill. The days are so long now that they store a fair amount of light, even like that. And, if the power goes out and we need light most of the day and some of the night is already over anyway. These should provide enough light to wrap something up, go upstairs, whatever.
Tonight, we used them to find our flashlights, or as I like to think of them, the metal cases holding our dead batteries. So we loaded up fresh batteries in all of the flashlights by the bright LEDs of the solar lamps.
And just as we finished that chore the power came back on. Soon after the storms moved on and our power stayed stable. Our trip on the Oregon Trail, then, was a short one tonight. But we were fortunate. Some people have been out for a good long while now.
Because they needed a new kind of challenge, I guess. My challenge this evening was simply getting up the stairs. Those hills …
