When I started cycling, a 5 degree slope felt like a wall. I'd lean into one of those gentle rises with my lungs burning, convinced the road had personally wronged me. Then I got a little stronger, and 5 degrees became just a slope. The wall moved. Now it was 7 degrees, and 7 degrees felt like a nightmare.
The first time I attempted Sugarloaf, I couldn't finish it in one go. I stopped in the middle, pulled into a stranger's driveway to catch my breath, then pushed off and found the next driveway a little further up. I climbed that hill in embarrassing, humbling segments.
These days I ride Sugarloaf in laps. A 10 degree climb, 200 feet of elevation, over and over, to get ready for the Horrible Hundred. The wall I once couldn't imagine clearing is now the thing I do on purpose, repeatedly, for fun.
Here's the part that sounds like a motivational poster: doing hard things makes other things easier, and it shows you what you're actually capable of. It's a cliché because it's true. Once your baseline for "hard" moves, everything below it gets quietly easier. The climb rewrites your sense of what counts as normal.
But that's only half the story, and it's the tidy half.
The less comfortable truth is that not all hard things make you grow. There are an endless number of hard things available to you at any moment, and most of them are just difficult, not useful. Suffering is cheap. You can find pain anywhere. The skill isn't seeking out difficulty, it's choosing which difficulty is worth your body and your time.
Sugarloaf makes me a better rider. Riding it in laps builds the specific engine I need for a century. That's a hard thing pointed at something. Grinding myself down for no reason other than to prove I can endure it would just be damage wearing the costume of discipline.
And then there's the side almost nobody puts on the poster: knowing when to stop.
We celebrate persistence so loudly that quitting starts to sound like failure. But some of the people I respect least are the ones who couldn't tell the difference between a hard climb and a genuine limit. Think of the climbers who die on Everest, often not on the way up but on the way down, past their turnaround time, too committed to the summit to admit the mountain had already won. The same stubbornness that got them within reach of the top is the thing that killed them.
That's the tension I keep coming back to. Persistence and quitting aren't opposites, they're a balance you have to keep re-calibrating. Push too little and you never find your edges. Push past the wrong point and you don't grow, you just break.
On the bike, I've learned to tell the two apart, mostly. There's the discomfort of effort (burning legs, hard breathing) that means I'm working. And there's a different, quieter signal that means something is actually wrong: a sharp pain, a bad line, a body with nothing left. The first one I ride through. The second one I respect. Ignoring it isn't brave, it's just foolish.
So when people say "do hard things," I'd add two footnotes. Choose your hard things on purpose, because the difficulty itself was never the point, the growth is. And learn the difference between the wall you can climb and the cliff you shouldn't. The driveways I stopped at on Sugarloaf weren't quitting. They were the reason I could eventually ride the whole thing.
That, to me, is the real skill. Not just doing the hard thing, but knowing which hard thing, and how far.
