Day 289: Summits

Took a rest day today. My calves are still screaming every time I move. That workout on Thursday must have been better than I thought at the time.

We dined with BC near Manhattan Beach at Sammy's wood-fired pizza. Not such a fan, our pizzas were cold and my salad warm and wilty--quite possibly because we had waited so long for it to come to the table. The service was bad, but the company was great. It's nice to have friends. On BC's advice, we drove over Palace Verde to see the moon shining on the water. Beautiful. It made me nostalgic for my bike tour.

Today is the one year anniversary of the conquering of my nemesis: Leggett Hill, a two thousand foot climb which had me sleepless and worried for months. A task which had grown to mammoth proportions in my mind, and caused me multiple nightmares. The night before I was to climb Leggett, I had a dream that the hill was a giant thumb sticking up out of the landscape with a road switchbacking to the top. In my dream, I nearly fell off my bike at the sight. When I looked back, the hill had become a soft serve ice-cream cone with the road spiraling to the top. The last time I looked at the hill in my dream, it had become a Mounds bar with the road smoothly going up and over. There was a load of relief in that dream.

The day that I set on my conquest, I set out alone. But a wrong turn and a bathroom break allowed my camp mate, Wendy, to catch me up, we climbed the hill together. Company always makes dreaded tasks more pleasant.

The road over Leggett was much more akin to the first vision on Leggett in my dream, long and filled with switchbacks. There was very little traffic on the road that morning, and the sun shone brilliantly through the trees. Climbing hills on a bike is not easy, but add a heavy touring bike and all my gear for camping, cooking, and food and water, and a tough job becomes exhausting. But simply by turning my pedals, cranking my sprockets, going even when it was hard, I continued moving forward and eventually get to the top.

I have to admit that summitting was wholly uneventful. It was not marked and there was no view. It wasn't until I was rolling downhill that I recognized my accomplishment. It had been a lovely hill, cool in the shade and full of interesting things to see. And in the end, Leggett, my nemesis, was only a big hill.