It's All Mental

I went for a ride yesterday because it was beautiful out (43*, it's all relative) and because I need to find time to ride more.  While I'm improving with each ride, coming off of an injury is humbling.  I've made up my mind to try and get in harder rides in an attempt to ride myself into shape faster, but that is proving to have some challenges I hadn't anticipated.  Most of them mental.



Yesterday's ride was a prime example.  I've been having a rough go of it on hills because my lungs and my legs give up at different times and I can't gauge when either is going to quit.  This causes me to either back it off way too soon in an effort to preserve myself, or push myself and pop.  To fix this I decided to just do hilly rides until my form comes back.  The best place around here for hilly rides is Valley Forge so I headed there with an idea of the ride I was going to do and an alternate route if I wasn't feeling great.

I've been fighting the urge to slowly work in the Cat 4 hills on the back side of the park.  It's not the steepness but the length I don't think I can deal with yet.  So for yesterdays ride I decided to work in two of the shorter hills in the park that are tough even when I'm in shape.  Gulph Road is tough heading towards 23, and really tough coming from 23.  I went towards 23 and was hurting enough that I had to stand to keep moving forward.  When I got to the top I turned onto Mt Joy (local name for the largest hill inside the park, also known as Mt Misery) and tried to recover in time for the fun that it brings.  I got about half way up and come off a switchback and just wanted to quit.  After the switchback is straight shot of 9+% that looks shorter than it is because of its steepness.  I got about 100ft into it and mentally just wanted to quit.  My lungs hurt, my legs were shaky and I just wanted to turn around and ride back down.

I'm not sure why, but at that moment a wave of "you don't get stronger by quitting" came over me and I just stood up, looked at my front hub and slowly turned the pedals.  It turned out to be the right decision because I got to the top of Mt Joy, at a banana, took the picture at the end of this paragraph and then rode back home.  On the ride back home I didn't have a moment of doubt on any hill I came across.  There was one hill in particular that normally I just don't like and I powered up it in the big ring.  There was no stopping me.  So the next time I'm thinking about quitting I'm going to think back to that moment and know that I can do it and just keep riding.