It occurred to me today that your power only gets tested when you’re heading uphill.

NOTE: A MAJORITY OF THE WRITTEN WORDS IN THIS POST WERE WRITTEN BY ME WHILE I WAS ON A RUN ON A PARTICULARLY HILLY PART OF A ROAD IN MY TOWN, BY SPEAKING THE WORDS INTO MY PHONE AS I RAN. SEE IF YOU CAN FIGURE OUT WHICH PARTS.

Let me ask you a question: “What kind of an engine do you need to coast?”

The answer is, you don’t need any engine at all to coast, because momentum and gravity are doing the work.

Nothing inside the vehicle is powering the vehicle during a coast, but when momentum and gravity give way, what’s inside the vehicle –it’s engine– is the only thing that’s going to continue to power the vehicle.

This thought actually reminds me of a line from a Pixar movie, Toy Story. When Woody mocks Buzz, who believes that he can fly, by saying, “That’s not flying. That’s falling with style”, it makes me think about the fact that, gliding and coasting are pretty similar, inasmuch as they are not powered maneuvers.

You don’t need an engine for either of these.

* * *

When I was a kid, my parents drove cars with manual transmissions, and so I was taught to drive on a car with a manual transmission. My dad taught me how to use the clutch, how to shift between gears, and he taught me about putting the car in neutral, which is –of course– no gear at all. He taught me that, when you’re going down a hill, you don’t really need power all that much, so you put the car in neutral (or just hold down the clutch) and you let gravity and momentum do the work of moving the car forward.

This, according to my dad, was a technique for saving gas, because the more you were able to coast, the less gas you ended up consuming.

Sometimes, I wonder how many of us have been coasting for so long, as to have conserved enough gas to start to power forward on some things.

* * *

Near the home where I grew up, there is a hill on a road called Chamberlain Road. The hill is a pretty steep, downward grade, and at the bottom, there was a single-lane tunnel on a two-lane road.

When I was a kid, just starting to drive, we would coast to the bottom of that hill on Chamberlain Road, and because it was so steep, you could get going pretty fast without ever using your engine much at all. And so, we would often come to that single lane tunnel at the bottom of that steep hill, going so fast that –if by chance– there happened to be anyone coming through that tunnel heading in the opposite direction, we would have been killed, and probably so would they.

Luckily for us, that never happened, or we eventually came to our senses and realized that it was important to use the brake when you’re coasting, so you don’t get going too fast.

Even without an engine’s power, you can get going too fast.

The thing about that hill was, no matter how fast you were going when you got to the bottom, and when you got through that tunnel, what waited for you on the other side was the upward climb. No matter how fast you were going when you went through that tunnel, it was going to require power from the engine, because all things being equal, momentum down a hill isn’t enough to carry you back up the hill.

* * *

A friend of mine said to me the other day that he’d seen me out while I was running, and that I looked good heading down the hill that I was on. I told this friend that it’s easy to look good going down the hill. He laughed, and then he asked, “Have you ever run down the hill, but you didn’t have to run back up it?”

That question caught me off-guard; of course, from a philosophical standpoint, the idea that life has its ups and downs, that sometimes the going is easy, and sometimes the going is hard; the philosophical point of my friend’s comment wasn’t lost on me.

But then, I also thought to myself that I tend to run in a loop; I would imagine most people do, as they want to end up where they started off –> most likely their home.

When you run in a loop and you live at a certain elevation, and you head in a certain direction, that might involve an uphill climb. And, if it does, you will go up 20 or 30 or 80 feet on that particular hill, and then you’ll be 20 or 30 or 80 feet in the air, compared to where your home is.

You will eventually be heading back down hill, whether you find a matching hill that takes you down 20 or 30 or 80 feet in a single instance, or perhaps you’ll find a slight decline, that takes you down 15 feet, and then another slight decline that’ll take you down 25 feet, and then a couple more after that.

However it goes, by matter of the nature of geography, you will have to end back up at the same elevation where you started, in order to be at your home.

I tend to run in directions in my town that take me up hills; as I ascend, I can take some solace in the fact that, before I get back home, there’s going to be some easy-going downslopes that will compensate me for the work that I did going uphill. That is a reassuring thing to know when running, of course.

I think there are people who look at their lives, and what they see is a life that seems to have been almost constantly an uphill climb, with very few sections of easy-going, low-effort work. I also imagine that there are other people whose lives don’t seem to be very difficult at any point.

* * *

After I finished the run on Chamberlain Road, during which I recorded much of what you’ve read in this post, I told my wife to never let me run on that road again –> that hilly run almost killed me. But, for as difficult as it was, I learned some lessons during that run.

Heading downhill might be great, from a running standpoint, but it means that, at some point, you’re going to have to head back uphill to get to the elevation where you were. The easy-going, low-effort parts of our lives aren’t worth getting that excited about, I don’t think, unless we are also going to then get really cranked about the difficult parts, as well. Some people are all about the hills and the valleys.

Most importantly, the moments when I’ve come to be most impressed with my power aren’t the downhill moments. The accomplished fighter has to have been in some fights.