Thirty-Seven Miles

Yesterday I rode 37 miles in The Empire State Ride to End Cancer on the North Shore of Nassau County. It wasn’t a flat, friendly 37, but instead was a course that climbed and dropped and climbed again, the kind where you stop trusting a downhill because you already know what’s probably waiting on the other side of it.

About halfway up one of the long winding hills, legs burning, lungs screaming, I caught myself thinking the obvious thought: this is a lot like the disease we were all out there riding against.

Ups and downs are the obvious metaphor, but there’s more.

The climbs aren’t hard because they hurt. They’re hard because you can’t see the top. You grind upward with no proof the crest is close, and the only thing keeping you on the bike is the next pedal stroke, then the one after that. That’s chemo. That’s the waiting room. That’s the stretch of recovery long after you ring the bell. You don’t get through it by believing the summit is near. You get through it by refusing to stop.

And the descents — I used to think the downhills were the reward. They’re not. They’re brief, they’re borrowed, and you spend them carrying speed you’ll hand right back on the next climb. Worse, the faster you go - I hit 29.8 miles per hour yesterday on a 21 pound carbon fiber bike - the less safe you feel. You’re scanning the road for the squirrel ready to appear out of nowhere, the pothole or tree branch you catch a half-second too late, the crash that’s always a blink away. The speed you wanted becomes the thing you’re braced against.

That’s remission. A good scan is a descent. A clear month. A day you feel like yourself again. You take it, you’re grateful for it — and some part of you is still watching the road, waiting for the thing you won’t see coming. You don’t mistake it for the finish. The course isn’t done with you, and it never asks permission about the elevation. You don’t get to choose your hills. You only choose whether you keep climbing them.

What I didn’t expect was the company.

I wasn’t out there alone. None of us were. Riders I’d never met, all riding the same brutal course on a hot June day for the same reason — some survivors, some riding for people who didn’t survive, some just there for the challenge. Nobody raced. We pulled each other up the long ones. And that’s the truest part of the whole thing: you don’t get up the hill by wanting it more than the person beside you. You get up it because you’re surrounded by people who won’t let you quit on the climb where quitting would’ve been easy.

I lost a friend to this disease this week. I thought about him on every ascent. He’d have liked the hills — he never traveled or trusted easy roads either.

I crossed the finish line a couple hours later a little tired, both physically and emotionally. The hills are still there. None of us conquered the course yesterday, nor did we conquer cancer by getting on a bike and raising a few bucks. We just kept turning the pedals until we earned the right to stop.