Looking Back

Today was the hilliest day of the week. Luckily we now had four days of biking experience and (amazingly) each day our legs seemed a little stronger than the day before. Today's ride, rather than featuring a long uphill and long downhill at the end of the day, just got more and more hilly.

Still I'd seen steeper hills than anything we were encountering (albeit the steeper hills had been much shorter!) After hours of ups and downs I found myself on a long uphill climb and I just thought to myself - the route can't scare me anymore - I've seen worse!

After a particularly long, speedy downhill and then a long grueling uphill climb (probably about five miles altogether), Jim said to slow and take a look back at where we'd come from. It was amazing to see the huge hills we'd just struggled over.

I thought - what a particularly useful attitude to take a look back and see where you've been and what you've accomplished. We're usually in such a rush to go forward we rarely see these things. It really helped put things in perspective to see that tough section which we'd gotten through and to know that we were stronger for the effort. It certainly gave me a new way to look at my last twelve months...

Kaaren, our map reader stated that we'd now gone over the last hill. Miraculously though, the hills continued unabated. The last five miles of the ride I couldn't stop laughing at each new hill we had to climb. Everytime we turned a corner and found a new one we'd exclaim "Oops!"