Life lessons on two wheels

What do you think about on day three when you’ve been in the saddle for six and a half hours and there’s a big hill you didn’t expect looming ahead and your Bike Brain says it’s 97 degrees and you need to believe that this biking/ camping adventure is more than just a biking/ camping adventure?

Here’s what you think about… Allow me to present these nuggets of sweaty wisdom (with their bike-centric application, in parentheses):

Yes, you can have everything! Just not all at the same time.
(“Everything” in bike touring terms: generous shoulders, wind at your back, no traffic, scenic road, shade. Each one is a joy in itself; together, they are pure ecstasy – but they never occur together.)

When it looks like it can’t get any worse, it does.
(That first-day 95-degree heat becomes 97 on day 2 and 101 on the afternoon of day 3.)

When it feels like it will never get better, it does.
(Thanks to Chamois Butter applied liberally to nether regions.)

Don’t ruin a good experience by thinking about how fleeting it is.
(Ah, that glorious nano-second-of-relief patch of shade. Breath into it, lean into it, don’t mourn/curse its passing even before it passes.)

You have to do the hard miles to earn the easy miles.
(Self-explanatory, in life and on the bike.)

And in the end: It’s all good miles.
(The tough uphill ones, the blazing hot ones, the no-effort downhill swooping ones, the ones at the ragged end of a long day, the one’s in the cool of the morning with a stomach full of oatmeal. All of them.)

And, perhaps one nugget that has minimal application to every day life but did sustain (and entertain) me up an endless, merciless incline:

Whoever wrote “the hills are alive with the sound of music” never biked up one.