The pond remains.
On an uphill run between Orange and Laurel, a two-mile stretch that begins congenially and ends with spite, there’s a place near the top where the grade gets serious. To the right of that slope, down an embankment, sits a ranch house beside a tree-lined pond. On a late-winter ride two seasons ago, struggling to slow my breathing and buoy my legs, I focused on the ice below me. My mind slid across that surface, calling back to lungs and quads. “Smooth as ice,” it intoned. “No effort.”
I’m thinking of that pond today, of the ice that undoubtedly has formed in recent days with temps that struggle to rise above the teens. It’s 60 degrees inside the four walls where Liz and I pedal side by side, imagining hills as we work out to a video designed to improve climbing skills. In my highest gear, my eyes focused on a spot of carpet six inches ahead of my front wheel, I’m visualizing that Fayette County road, climbing alone in early March 2008 or any of the half dozen rides with Dave since then, in summer’s heat and autumn’s damp chill, moving past an invisible line a stone’s throw from a pond, where the real work begins.
Then, as now, the words move with me.
“Smooth as ice. No effort.”
Of the marathons I’ve run, no single incident remains bolder in my memory or had more of an impact mentally than the man who stood near the 18-mile marker during the 1991 Columbus Marathon. Addressing the runners as they turned out of the AmeriFlora grounds, he called to each one as if he cared about them personally. “You look good. You feel good,” he said. “You look good. You feel good. Keep telling yourself.”
There was no wall that year, thanks, in part, to that mantra I carried to the finish line and into the rest of my life.
Today I’m visualizing again, even with a roof over my head and a trainer on a DVD calling me out of the saddle, working an imaginary hill in my bike’s biggest gear. In that instant I’m there alone by a Fayette County pond in winter, just as I’m climbing beside Dave last autumn. And, I’m somewhere in Michigan, on hills I’ve never seen, five months from now, pushing myself. All the while, I keep repeating.
“You look good. You feel good,” I say.
“Smooth as ice.”
16.15 miles — Trainer
