Comraderie Amongst Strangers

My body is wrecked. Its tired and my joints ache. My willpower is waning.

At least this early morning and last night this was the truth. No longer!

I had a ride this morning that turned from blah to YEAH!

This morning's prescription was hill repeats on the bike. 5 times up this hill.

I doubt the 11%...its steep, but NOT that steep

Its not that bad of a hill, it just hurts as you go up it more and more with little rest.

So I start my ride, and my legs are just flat. Before I hit the hill I do a 5 min interval @ full blast to clear the junk out of my legs. That worked, my legs are feeling better finally. I really don't want to do that hill, so I decide to do it only once.

As I start up it, there is a runner coming down it. We nod at each other. I get to the top, and my legs are good but mentally I'm still blah. As I am heading down the runner guy is coming back up. Oh man! If he is running up this thing, I have NO excuse to bail on my prescribed 5X repeat. So I head up for round #2 and he is coming back down, this time he does a "Yeah! Go!" as I suffer up and he is flying down.

That right there sealed the deal. No wussing out now. This guy looks like he is doing a bunch of intervals as well. Round #3 is a nod and a smile. Round #4 we could tell that we were thinking the same thing. We are crazy but we know what it takes to push ourselves. I think we also used each other as motivation to keep pushing up that hill.

For #5, he had left. He mentioned he was only doing 4 intervals. So for #5, it was all up to me. Nobody was around to push me and #5 was reserved for hammering up it to seal the deal. So I swallowed my pride and hammered up that thing, standing for 10 seconds, sitting for 10 seconds, and repeating until I got to the top. I thought there were knives jammed into my quads it hurt so bad!!!

So Mr. Runner dude, whoever you are, thank you. I think it was fate that we met at the same spot out in the middle of nowhere to accomplish the same thing.