Persistence is an excellent quality and strength. But it has a basement. There's a fine line between persistence and obstinance.
A battle against the wind is foolhardy. The wind is a powerful force of nature. Sometimes it's better to delay, to take a detour, or to take up a different tactic.
Today I share a rubric of four questions to help guide decisions that fall on the threshold of persistence and stubbornness.
And those are the questions I'm debating with myself this evening. My pedal assist is down. Towns are few and far between, and the wind is so strong it's difficult to walk outside, let alone ride a bicycle.
At one point today, I was going downhill, pedaling hard, and couldn't do more than 3.8 mph (6.1 kph). My speedometer made me think I was on a brisk walk on the treadmill, not a bicycle.
I distracted myself by racing a beetle. It lost interest after only a few yards and diverted to the ditch.
Then I got angry at two hawks. They were circling me, waiting for me to give up. I shouted at them. Then began to recognize the faint odor of carrion. Relief. It wasn't me they were after.
From there, all I could do was count pedal revolutions. 1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4, 3-2-3-4, 4-2-3-4... I placed bets on the count to reach the next reflector, guardrail, or whatever I could find to break the distance and punishing inclines into tractable bits.
The day began to diminish. I still had 25 miles to go. My average pace for the day was less than 6 mph (10 kph) and I expected to move even slower through the next stretch. Ebonezy's dissonant whistling grated on my nerves. The route was all uphill. I'd cross the Continental Divide twice more before reaching Rawlins.
Once again, the antelope began to leap. The stars came out. The coyotes yipped...closer than last night, I think. I pedaled on.
At 10:02pm I arrived. I'm shaking from exhaustion and can barely open the motel door. But the owner was expecting me, helped me in, and I fell asleep pondering this difference between persistence and obstinance.
Split Rock, also known as Twin Peaks, has a notch dividing its summit and looks like a gunsight. The location is near Jeffrey City, a town formerly named "Home on the Range" until uranium mining began in the 1950s.
