Triumph! My method in trying to get my climbing legs in shape has been wrong all year. I kept getting discouraged struggling on what I was calling "training climbs". Actually the climb I kept struggling on was an actual climb, not just a trainer.

It's not high, it's not long, but it has challenging steep sections for someone my age. If I had to categorize Taipei climbs, it would be a category 5. The lowest in difficulty, but it's not an automatic breeze to get up it like my other training climbs.

Anyway, all this year I've been trying to prepare for bigger climbs, only to be thwarted by long periods off-bike because of weather or being discouraged by struggling on training rides. 

Recently I had a spell off-bike for no reason. There has been fine weather in the past few weeks and I couldn't make it out for a single ride. I even finally bought one of those chain-cleaning machines to alleviate the guilt of not maintaining my bike properly (although I wonder if part of the difficulty getting out on a ride is because my chain was finally pristine and I didn't want to muck it up!).

So coming into this most recent opportunity to get out on a ride, I said fuck it, no more training climbs. I'm hitting the big climbs and see what happens. I'll freely go down to the lowest granny gear, I'll crawl at 3 miles per hour, and if I really can't go on, I WILL abandon and come back down and do whatever alternative ride and not be disappointed.

So I chose the closest obvious big climb to do in the mountains north of Taipei, starting in Neihu and riding up to a gap from where you can alternatively go to Wanli on the northeast coast, or come back to Taipei's Shilin district, or take any of several routes on the same side (south) of the mountain range down to Xizhi and return to Taipei.

I had no expectations. I could have abandoned as soon as I hit the lower slopes of the climb. And, yea, I felt it right away. Immediately I was struggling with breathing and focused on maintaining cardio-vascular stability; deep breaths to get any remaining alcohol metabolized through my system.

For breakfast I had half of a leftover Quizno's tuna sub and that was in my stomach. I usually don't eat breakfast or eat much before rides, and I felt it when my stomach decided it needed to digest it in a rush for more energy.

I don't know how physiology works, but I felt the sharp pain in my stomach as I continued on the climb, and it felt like an increase of acid to metabolize the sandwich into energy. Anyway, the pain didn't last long, and the higher I went, the higher the gear I was riding on.

It could be that the slopes are steeper lower down and ease off higher up, but I was able to get off the granny gear higher up. The important thing is I didn't abandon. My condition is no where near where it was when I was riding in San Francisco, and I'm not so reticent about riding in lower gears. Now, if I can manage it, no matter what gear, I'm alright with it.

And I completed the climb. Unfortunately it wasn't the 2,000 ft. climb I thought it was. It was 1,950'. Psychological disappointment. In these cases, you want to break that 2,000 ft. threshold. And as many routes lead up to that pass, they only go as high as 1,950'. I'm targeting a climb over to Pingxi next.

This after a night of total insomnia. After several incidents of one-offs of insomnia, this appears to be a stretch of it. A stretch of back-end insomnia maybe I can deal with, but add in total insomnia, well I guess I'll just report on it.