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Strength
That spring and summer, I didn't know the why or how of it. I simply knew I needed to be strong. It was a knowing from deep within. A knowing before and beyond words. A knowing like instinct.
I couldn't explain why I felt compelled to ride my bike like a madwoman, why I would get up at 4:30 a.m. to ride the 65-mile, 5,000-foot-elevation-gain La Sal Mountain Loop Road. Why I would do it before work. Sometimes multiple times in a week. I knew I had to be strong; and this was the only route I recognized that would get me there.
Alone on the brutal laccolithic inclines, slowly devouring the terrain with my tires, my confidence grew in concert with my quadriceps. The former was a muscle that had atrophied in recent years. But in climbing those strange transition zones between desert and mountain - where cactus and conifers cradled shared breezes - I found faith in myself. I found a foreign courage.
If I could scale the twists and turns of a mountain's 10,000 feet before breakfast, what else might I be capable of? Could I also dictate the valleys and vicissitudes of my own life?
It was a long climb to biking bliss. Longer than any Loop Road ascent. I initially hated and feared my bike. It was too zippy and squirrelly for my pedestrian tastes. It felt like a wild horse, and I was no cowgirl. My first six months in the saddle, approximately 90 percent of rides involved a breakdown of some sort. Not mechanical. Emotional. The uphills were too hard, and the downhills were too steep. I was too slow, and my husband was too fast.
I was no cyclist . . . and yet I persistently went spinning.
For years, the thought of the Loop Road generated switchbacks in my stomach. I would ride it a few times each summer. And I would cry every time. Hence, the strangeness of this new need to regularly commune with it, to collaborate with it in the search for my strength and worth.
However, once I finally found that strength, I realized it had nothing to do with cycling after all.
I was strong enough to speak up, stand up, get up and leave. And I did.
Cycling carried me through the daunting days of divorce and the year of subsequent soul-searching. Nothing was certain beyond mileage, mesas and mountains. When I was in the saddle - careening around redrock-bound switchbacks, ascending aspen-lined grades, spinning through panoramic views of the desertscapes that forever call my heart home - this was when I knew the answers to questions of path, purpose, destination. Otherwise adrift, crankshafts and gear rings provided me with hours of grounding. For the interim - during my search for another one - cycling was my reason for being.
I ended up finding long-sought peace and purpose on a solitary July campout, as a midnight monsoon bellowed through the Colorado River canyon. I was drenched, awestruck, and finally - somehow - hopeful. My ride the next morning was not away from one reality, but toward another. It was embrace rather than escape.
Last winter was a particularly hard one in Moab - frigid temperatures, lots of snow - not conducive to cycling. I spent four months separated from my bike. And while such absence might have undone me the previous year, I instead felt nothing more than a longing for warmer weather.
My substance and strength were now attached to other measures of being in this world.
However, when the first of March dawned sunny and warm - Moab's first spring-like day of the year - I greased my chain, inflated my tires, gave my neglected bike a tender once-over, and hopped aboard for the inaugural ride of the season. I didn't expect much from these winter legs of mine, but the euphoria I felt at being in the sun, in the saddle, utterly alive and hopeful and happy, this feeling carried me into the La Sal Mountains, to the top of the grade affectionately known as The Big Nasty. I smiled. I laughed. I almost vomited from the unexpected and sudden exertion. I am back, I thought.
This year, because it is not my everything - not my sanity, my ground, my direction or purpose - my relationship with the bike will be gentler. Yes, I will continue to push myself across mesas and up mountains. Yes, I will endure sore legs and saddle sores. Yes, I will push for the top and smile broadly when I get there. But now I realize that my strength is not bound up in tubes and tires or tackling torturous inclines.
Rather, my strength is bound up in me, in this heart of mine that has endured so much more than the pounding of a Loop Road ride. This heart of mine that has carried me across higher peaks and lower valleys than the La Sals will ever know. This heart of mine that dreams of heights beyond a bike's capacity for climbing.
Moab writer Jen Jackson is a contributing editor of Inside/Outside magazine.
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