I Dig Pain.

Henry Rollins once said, "I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.”

I don't like mine yet, but I don't fear it like I used to. Too much of what we do to grow as humans requires pain as a gateway. To avoid it and expect progress and difference in our lives is, at best, folly.

Yes, this is going to turn into another biking story.

I met a friend after work to ride a trail that I'd heard of, but never explored myself. He'd ridden it several times this year, and lured me with tales of adventure, glory and heaving up a lung. I was skeptical, but you can't really argue or ride slower than a guy that has to use an asthma inhaler and still consider yourself manly.
The dadgum trail has two parts. The first has 1,343 vertical feet of climbing over 2.4 linear miles. Except the miles are not linear, they're UP and nothing currently available to science can accurately measure a rockfall. And the whole trail, basically, is God's gift to rocks and purgatory for guys on bikes.
The second half of the trail, or the 'nice scenic loop' was 884 feet of vertical gain and 733 of vertical loss. In other words, Not Level Ground.
Also, more rocks.

I ride very much like a paranoid father of four children (i.e., a complete chicken) when I don't know where the drop-offs to oblivion are on a new trail.
The fear of being afraid is stronger than the fear of the actual fall in me. Once I know where the things are that may cause me to pause, stop, get hung up and crash by losing momentum, then I can ride past them.
The power to do the thing comes by having done it.

I didn't rock the climbs, I didn't bomb the descents and we got passed by a lot of guys with suspiciously large trucker guts. Nice to find out that the definition of 'fitness' has nothing to do with actual shape after I've given up the good soda and junk food.

I also found that the urge to stop is enormous when multiplied by nervousness and fear over being someplace that may be over your head in terms of technical skill. Add in a dash of fatigue and a few thousand rocks and, well, it's not an easy or pretty victory over gravity. In most cases with anything technically difficult, slowing down will lead to a harder fall than trusting yourself and the bike and riding through it. Having a friend that's done it to show you that it can be done is priceless.

We saw a lot of folks turn around before the halfway point, and they all seemed pretty happy to have made it as far as they did. Makes me wonder if there isn't always something more, a set of skills and endurance out there further that someone else already has mastered; they see me and think, 'Yes, he made it halfway... maybe one day he'll reach the end and see what I've seen.'

My legs hurt. I have small red marks on my legs from the yucca plants I ran into. I have bonus red marks all over from rocks that kicked up from my front tire. I rode with most of my mouth numb from Novocaine. I managed, as I do every stinking time I ride, to push my chainring into my right calf and leave a giant greasemark and welt. My lungs burned and my legs felt half-numb on the climb up... almost at that point where the muscles just refuse to fire when the brain says GO.
I'm not saying this to give the impression that it was climb worthy of notice and to beg accolades for having done it. There were far too many riders of all skill levels, some with K-mart pig-iron bikes that were ahead of me for that to ring true.
But, I rode it. I didn't cave in and walk when I could have... and that means that the pain from pushing past mental barriers and the desire to stop may bear fruit. I'll be stronger tomorrow than I am today. It was ultimately as much of a reward as I decided I wanted.

Incidentally, I grinned like a monkey with the full run of a banana plantation on the way down. There are rewards to long climbs, and one of them is the descent. Remember the feeling when you'd see Bo and Luke Duke jump the General Lee over the creek and get away from the sheriff?

Yeah, it's better than that.