Coming Home to Hills

On Monday, I started my Thanksgiving holiday a bit early. Kevin Warwick, an old friend of mine from Cincinnati, came up to Chicago to hang out, eat some good food, and do a spot of shopping. His plan was to return home on Monday, and seeing that I need to make my way to OU sometime in the next week, I decided to join him. Into his Honda Civic we packed two bikes (my Voodoo and Falcon, which I am selling to Kevin), a road wheelset for the Voodoo, and a number of bags, cases, and other bike parts that only I, the paranoid mechanic, would need.

The drive was uneventful, barring the torrential rain about 40 miles outside of Indianapolis. Halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, the terrain started to swoop up, and the flat-prairie boredom of Northern Indiana and Illinois was replaced by beautiful, rolling hills covered in the leaves of autumn.

As a cyclist, I love hills. I love the painful slog up precipitious pitches, as well as I love the feeling when one runs out of gears to upshift into, and the climb upwards is turned from a painful adventure, into one demanding determination and will. I love seeking out heady hills to ascend, and windy, long roads to descend. That's what cycling's all about, innit? The grueling effort of a climb rewarded by a descent down at speeds of 50 MPH or more.

Unfortunately, such pleasures are rarely afforded to me now that I live in Chicago. In the suburbs, there is terrain that makes for the occasional challenge, but all of those hills are climbs for power-sprinters, of which I am not. So, when the opportunity comes to spend some time in Cincinnati, my hometown, I seize it. Cincinnati is surrounded by hills and rolling terrain – the Ohio River and all its tributaries have carved all sorts of channels into the glacial till, with the end result being steep slopes everywhere. Add in Cincinnati's low population count and the passivity of its drivers, and you have the recipe for some of the best road cycling in the Midwest. Farm and rural areas abound, and it only takes a 20 minute ride to get to complete and utter desolation, far removed from traffic and pedestrians.

And that's what I love to do when I come home: ride. I get good, hard rides in with thousands of feet of climbing, by myself or with a friend or two. We put in some solid efforts, get a coffee or cookie halfway through, and then soldier on to hit another hill and earn KOM points. But more than anything, I love to get out and ride, and the more sore and tired I am, the better. And for a real leg-breaker, this is the ride I did today, just to get things opened up. I have better and more sinister routes in mind for the rest of my vacation.

Oh, if anyone ever wants to come and join me, just say the word. I've got room (rather, my parents) have room to spare for a cyclist looking to get hurtin' on some hills.