Once more, with feeling...

It's amazing, the greening that is going on right now. I swear that my garden was a dull pile of brown dirt just a couple of days ago. But the Hostas are insistently poking their creepy little worm-like talons up out of the ground now. Bushes and trees are starting to take on the green haze of early leaf buds. My favorite, the tulip trees, are getting ready to explode with their lush, pink chunky blossoms.

And as I bike more and more, I am beginning to appreciate the little things that you don't really notice when you're traveling by car. The croaking toads that I had mentioned earlier for one. The canopy of trees that cover a street that you bike up for another.

I took a new route home from the Y on Saturday: Bever Avenue.

It was a different type of hill than what I had been riding. Mostly they had been long and slow. This was a little more rolling. Different on a Saturday morning than the normal busy weekday, I decided to take it on since it was an unknown. If I had been hoping for an easier rode home, I was sorely disappointed.

After a decent swim workout, about 1000 yards, my legs were already on the tired side. But there was the promise of fresh chocolate croissants from one of the best places in Cedar Rapids: Croissant du Jour. Well, they are certainly the best places in Eastern Iowa for croissants, as far as I'm concerned.

So I pushed on.

Bever Avenue turned out to be a different sort of hill challenge: shorter, slow climbs, mixed with short downhill spurts and an actual traffic light.

Thankfully, the last stretch was a flat/downhill combo, before it came time to tackle The Hill.

Yes, those are capital letters.

I'm paying The Hill the respect that is due. It's the last hill; the hill home.

I have not made it up to the top since that one time, so long ago that it's now only a vague memory. I have, however, learned to respect it and what it can teach me.

Small goals are my way of conquering it now. Each time, half a driveway more until I stop. The last drive on the right before the first cross street was my best.

Somehow, somewhere, on these few trips to work or workout and back I have learned how to attack. Maybe it was the dreaded spin class where I learned it and the addition of the clips have helped put it to use in the real world, I don't know. I attacked the long, slow hill up Blake a couple of weeks ago, making the first time I made it up without stopping ever.

I did it again, though this time I was aware of what I was doing, up the last portion of The Hill.

And it was an amazing feeling.

I'm down to one stop on The Hill. That's the most that I will make anymore.

Yesterday, I was to that last drive on the right, ready to throw up, when I figured I would try to shift down one more. And to my amazement, there was one more gear to go down.

And one more.

And one more.

And one more still.

If I had been better aware of the gear that I had been in, it was entirely possible that I could have gone on to Ridgemore, and then on to Terry before crossing the buckle in the road that I consider to be my finish line: the line where the road levels out and begins to slope ever so slightly back down to my street.

I guess I'll never know if it could have happened. But it will happen one day. And one day soon.

My breath was hard, my legs jello-y, as I flopped down onto the couch in my living room, begging for my chocolate croissant and the cup of coffee.

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man's determination. ~Tommy Lasorda