Going up

My Roller skis

You remember when I said that Agony Hill was the hardest time trial ever. I stand corrected. This skate roller ski time trial was actually the hardest thing ever. EVER.

Last week, my coach told us that we were doing a skate roller ski time trial on Friday. I didn't think much of it when I first heard about it. Then again when I first heard about it, I didn't actually know what it was like. The next day at training I started asking around to see if anyone on the team had done it before. I knew the kids in my grade hadn't done it yet, so I started by asking the tenth graders. They said they hadn't done it either. Then I asked the 11th graders and they hadn't done it either. I then thought that this was probably a new time trial that he just came up with, but just to be sure I asked the seniors. Only two of the seniors on my team remember doing this... three years ago. One of them said that it was all uphill, 5k long and really hard. The other one told me that it was short and easy.

When Friday finally rolled around I had no idea what to expect. I kept getting mixed responses, some people said it was all uphill and really long and others said it was fairly flat and short. I decided to prepare myself for a mostly uphill, medium length time trial. My team met at a park near the place we were starting. Our coach told us where to go during the time trial or what the course was. I'm 98% sure that he said something along the lines of "Ok, so you're going to go up on this road and then take a right, then the road will curve left, but stay straight and then take a left, a right, and another right"... I did not have the mental capacity to memorize that and surprise, surprise I was going first. Oh well, I guess I was just going to have to go with it.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, GO! And I just began the time trial. I started off on a slight uphill section and started going a little too fast. I thought to myself this isn't too bad. That was because that was the flatest (or most flat) section of the entire course. It got very steep, very quickly. I felt like it was never going to end. Ever. It was so steep and so hard that I couldn't feel my arms anymore and I was only six minutes in. Somehow I kept going and hallelujah I saw my coach. He told me before I started that when I saw him that meant I was almost done. I got a sudden burst of energy and skied really fast (actually I was still going pretty slow, but it felt fast), until he shouted "Nice job, you're almost a third of the way done". I slowed back down to my normal pace and thought "what the heck, you said I would be done when I saw you".

Anyway I kept going up. I just sat there thinking about how I didn't even know it was possible for there to be this much uphill. I thought they were exaggerating when they said it was all uphill. The next time I saw my coach I didn't speed up because I just assumed I wasn't anywhere near finishing. At that point I kind of thought it was just going to go on forever. I was right, I was only about halfway through. I kept skiing (in an immense amount of pain) for another ten minutes until I saw my coach again. As I got closer, I realized that two of my teammates were stopped next to him. That meant one of two things, they either died (meaning injured themselves) or that was the finish. It turned out to be the finish! I used all of my remaining energy to speed up to get to the finish. Once we all finished we piled into the van and drove down to the bottom. It was only 3.5 kilometers, but it was still the hardest 3.5 kilometers of my life. And yes this time trial was even harder than agony hill in my opinion and I wasn't the only one who thought so.

As I was trying to come up with a title for this blog post, I remembered what my blog was called and realized that I probably should have seen an all uphill time trial coming.