Gravity dictates the truest mantra on Earth: What goes up must come down.
But give me a bicycle and a mountain and I’ll break that law or die trying. Whether by blessing or curse, I am drawn irresistibly to hills and the roads that go up them. I scorn horizontal distances, thriving instead on elevation gain. And while I do worship the beauty of the high country—its animals, the trout streams staircasing down its canyons, the sun slipping through its peaks every evening—in the end, mine is a world of numbers.
As a pragmatic hill hunter, I am always seeking to optimize my rise over run. I won’t rest well at night if I haven’t climbed at least 3,000 feet that day, and doing so with as little forward motion as possible is ideal. For instance, I can pedal up Highway 9 to Skyline Boulevard to achieve precisely this floor minimum. However, the average gradient here is just 2 percent—a slow 30-mile climb. That just won’t do. Page Mill Road, on the other hand, is a model of efficiency, a 7.5-mile climb of 2,000 feet beginning in Palo Alto. In the Marin Headlands, the popular McCullough-Conzelman climb goes up 700 feet in just 1.5 miles. And in Sonoma County, Cavedale Road offers excellent bang for buck—2,100 vertical feet over 7 miles horizontal. Far away, in Turkey, where I recently toured alone, I pedaled one afternoon from a sea-level valley of banana orchards up 6,000 feet in just 20 miles forward into a landscape of goatherds, brown bears and wind-scraped crags. And one of the best climbs on earth, which I’ve yet to attempt, may be the paved road up Haleakala Volcano on Maui; it climbs 10,000 feet in 36 miles.
While long, steep climbs may get the endorphins jumping, shorter, steeper ascents provide a different category of challenge that I often can’t resist. In San Francisco, one can find slippery slopes that tilt to preposterous angles. Among such trophies, 15 percent hills are warm-ups and 20-percenters are sometimes worth looking at twice. But it’s the 30 percent inclines that get my blood boiling. I even know of one that measures almost 40 percent.
Getting High
It’s a steep road I ride, but in this life I’m not alone. On my daily outings, I have come to know by face several dozen others who plainly bear the burden of the hill hunter. They come in different molds. There is the competitive sort, blinded by the sweat in his eyes and bent on annihilating distances. For example, while pedaling the McCullough-Conzelman climb in November, a man composed of Lycra, Gu and carbon pulled alongside me.
“Hey, man, you’re really moving!” he shouted fiercely, seemingly doped on blood. “You should get yourself a road bike!”
“I’ll never part with my Surly,” I vowed.
“You race?!” he screamed in my ear.
I couldn’t resist: “No. I just kick ass.”
“You ever hear of the Everest Challenge?!”
I said that I hadn’t but, to play his game, asked if he had heard of a two-mile climb in Hawai—
“No, no!” he bellowed. “FIFTEEN THOUSAND FEET!! The hardest ride in the WORLD!!” He let that sink in a moment, his eyes ablaze, sweat streaming off his nose, then whispered gravely, “I’ve done it.”
I didn’t like this man. So I ditched him.
But I’ve made friends with other hill hunters, cool-headed, calm men and women who are as glad to slow down and chat as they would be to say “On your left” to a peloton of racers. One of these riders is a softspoken man who takes long, steady climbs as medicine and therapy. Years ago, he found himself uncharacteristically winded while riding a routine slope. He went to the doctor and found his worst fears confirmed: cancer. Today he credits cycling as a factor in his recovery.
The Pain, The Gain
I believe, as my friend does, that a little hill climbing—or a lot—can only do a body good. True: Hills can hurt, and I confess now that some days I shrink from the mere thought of fighting gravity all the way up a mountain. It’s then that I rediscover the pleasure of passing an afternoon like most people might prefer—without sweating a drop. But always the urge returns to pounce on the nearest road that goes up, to get high once more on the burn of muscle, the stretch of the lungs and the pounding of my heart. I can remember the pre-hill era of my life, when I didn’t require such physical activity to keep me sane. Somehow, within the past six years, I’ve become hooked. Now I can’t go more than several days without it. I believe it’s chemical: I’m addicted.
Anyone who exercises should give hills a chance, for the exhilaration that comes after 30 minutes or so of working out arrives almost instantly when one assumes vertical motion. Hill climbing compresses the act of exercising into less time and less distance. Calories burn faster, muscles fatigue sooner, bodies grow stronger—all on hills.
On hills, too, incidental world records are easily set. I, for example, once pedaled a durian fruit fresh from Thailand to the top of Mount Tamalpais—an event I suspect had not happened before in the history of the universe. But setting athletic records has never interested me. My best time up the Trinity Grade near Sonoma was just over 20 minutes. The pros can spank that one in about 13 minutes—and they can keep their world records; in the end, I ride for myself.
Sadly, while hills today might measure my rise, someday they will only trace my fall. As I grow older, the grades that I ride regularly will seem to grow steeper, and one by one I will have to cast them off as physical feats beyond my abilities. Broderick Street in San Francisco’s Marina District, at 38 percent, will probably be the first one to go, thereby announcing that I have begun life’s long descent. With time and age, more routine climbs will join the ranks of the unclimbables, and the hour will come when I summit my last peak. I may not know it then, but I know this now: I will arrive at the top, inhale the view, perhaps even see a sunset, then take my descent and, for whatever reason it may be, never go up again.
For gravity wins in the end, and every hill hunter must one day come down.
