The Agony and the Rockpile

With a mile to go to the summit of Mount Washington, I found my rabbit. I had been struggling, mightily, on the eastern flank of the Northeast’s tallest peak, climbing nonstop for some 6-plus miles and more than 90 minutes atop my trusty two-wheeler, and desperately needed extra motivation.

The year was 2006. Although it was the third Saturday of August, a chilling fog blanketed Mount Washington above tree line. After more than an hour of pedaling — grinding would be more accurate — up the mountain’s relentless Auto Road, my legs felt like spent shotgun shells. My lungs and lower back were in open revolt. Worse, my gray matter began wandering into dangerous territory. Delirium was my ever-present co-pilot.

This is what the Mt. Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb can do to people. It can take healthy men and women and reduce them to a shaking, simpering bag of bones over the course of a few miles. Billed as “America’s First and Oldest Man-made Attraction,” the 164-year-old Auto Road twists and turns like a wet noodle across the 6,288-foot granite knob benevolently known as “the Rockpile.”

But the most daunting aspect of the road is its relentless pitch. It is, as one rider warned me, “a wall.” Each time I turned around one of the road’s 70 corners, it tilted upward. Again and again. Bottom to top, the road rises 4,270 feet from Pinkham Notch to the summit in a mere 7.6 miles. The average grade is 12%, with sustained sections of more than 18%. Some stretches are so steep I resorted to zigzagging across the road, like a sailboat tacking against the wind. There’s no place to coast. At the summit’s legendary “Corkscrew,” the pitch hits an ungodly 22% over the final 100 yards.

I knew what was coming, having done the ride two years earlier. That day lives on in family lore, as my wife and two young daughters waited patiently for me to arrive (all racers are required to have supporters at the summit to bring them back down). It took me so long to finish that my youngest, Brynne, was convinced that I’d gotten blown off the mountain. It was an understandable fear — the Auto Road can feel as claustrophobic as a mining shaft below tree line, barely two cars wide. Above 4,000 feet, the road doesn’t widen, but the sense of space does, with spectacular vistas and precipitous
drop-offs. There’s no protection.

That’s when I spied my rabbit. Clad in a bright yellow helmet and jersey, he was a wiry cyclist, roughly 300 yards ahead of me. In the distance, I spied the Mount Washington Weather Observatory, looking like Dorothy’s Emerald City of Oz. I put my head down, took a deep breath, and muttered: “You can catch him.”

Ignoring the burning in my thighs, I pushed harder, turning over the pedals. I snared my rabbit just at the base of the Corkscrew, gritted my teeth and prayed my muscles wouldn’t go into full spasm. Serendipitously, an event photographer caught an image of me as I crested the summit, wincing, my rabbit just behind me.

I couldn’t resist telling my young daughters, when they saw the photo, that I had just passed a yellow-clad Lance Armstrong — during the height of his Tour de France dominance — at the finish line. It was a classic “white lie” that dads will tell their kids, just for giggles. What I didn’t tell them is that I finished a full hour behind the winner, Ned Overend of Colorado (New England’s own Tyler Hamilton won the race, two minutes ahead of Overend, but has since been stricken from the event’s record books due to admitted drug use). My average speed? Barely 3½ miles an hour.

Of course, where I placed didn’t matter. It likely doesn’t matter for 90% of these “racers.” Finishing is what matters. The roof racks on my Subaru still sport a pair of stickers that proclaim: “This Bike Climbed Mt. Wasington.” The pride those words capture hasn’t dimmed in the past two decades. Not one bit.