Today was the climb up Mt. Pisgah on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had decided that rain or shine I would do it today because I didn't want to deal with weekend traffic and I wanted to enjoy our last Saturday here with my wife without the stress of dealing with a route I'd never done and that might blow up my body. So I traveled out to the US 74-A access point and rode south to climb the mountain. After a 5 mile warm-up I hit the climb and for the next 75 minutes I pretty much sat at my FTP and pedaled. It was about the most perfect climb I've ever done. But first, let me give you my impressions of the Parkway.
While I certainly can't speak of the whole thing given I've only ridden about 30 miles of the 400+ miles of the limited access scenic route, I can say that it was about as close to cycling nirvana as something can get while still having to share the road with automobiles. The BRP is a scenic motorway which is sort of a cross between an interstate and a national park. It's two lane with no marked shoulder but speed limits are 45 mph or less. There is only limited access and the drivers, at least around here, seem to understand that it's was build for enjoyment and not fast, convenient transportation. No commercial traffic is allowed on the Parkway and it seems that every effort was made to preserve the natural environment through which the Parkway was built. I would love to come back and do a tour that did a lot more of the route sometime in the future.
So, why was the climb perfect? Well, there were four or five distinct parts to it; each separated with a short flat to downhill section that lasted about a minute or so. What that meant was that I would set my power output at 300 or so and go at whatever speed that allowed for about 15-20 minutes and then get a short break. Some of the sections were steeper and I averaged around 9 mph while others were a little shallower and I could average 11-12. Every mile or so I come around a corner or curve and get a look out over a vista of the valleys surrounding the Pisgah ridgeline as I ascended to give me something to look at. The steepest parts of the climb were at the beginning and near the end but I never felt like anything I did was as hard as the two climbs I did earlier in the week. While those climbs were a lot shorter (3-4 miles instead of 15 and 1000 ft of vertical climb instead of 3000) they required more power output. It was definitely a Rhythm climb which works really well for me. I think if I lived here in Asheville, I might be real inclined to do the climb once per week during training weeks when I wanted to focus on increasing my FTP or my time trialing ability. I certainly understand why US Master TT Champion Andy Applegate chooses to live here.
So, it was an epic ride for me as the climb was the longest I've ever done (double the length of Hogpen though not much different in terms of the vertical gain) but as I wrote last time, it's hard to translate my experience into words. I think the biggest thing that characterized the ride was perseverance. The climb wasn't brutal most of the time but it did require a solid, hard effort for a long time. Come to think of it, it was a bit like getting my Ph.D. Most of that effort didn't require brutal hours and crushing effort but I had to work pretty hard day in and day out to do my research and write my dissertation. I think a lot of life is like that: to accomplish something lasting there needs to be a pretty hard, pretty constant effort with a few breaks to rest during the work. If you go too hard, you get a lot done but you blow up too soon. If you look too much at the mountain of work to be done, you'll get overwhelmed. If you focus too much on the risks and obstacles, you'll get fearful. If you don't ration your energy, you won't have enough when the going gets really steep and you need to go harder for a short time. If you don't take a break every so often, you'll just plain run out of gas.
The thing is that this analogy seems to work really well when you have a simple life with a small set of tasks like climbing a mountain or doing your Ph.D. work but I'm not sure how it goes when applied to a richer or more complicated life. It's a lot harder to go steady when there are 10 or 15 things clamoring for your attention. The saying goes that it's better to do a few things really well than to do a lot of things so-so but that can be hard to do. I'm reading a biography of Richard Carrington. Carrington was a "gentleman scientist" in 19th century England who did astronomy with a focus on solar observing. His work was fantastic when that was about all he did, but once his father died and left him a business that he had to run to provide for his extended family the wheels sort of came off the train. Maybe he had a mid-life crisis, maybe he tried to climb to hard and blew up but his career and his contributions were cut short by factors both within his control and without. It makes me consider what it is I really need to be doing and maybe simplify a lot.
Thanks for reading.
