We're in training. Let me rephrase. I'm in training for an organized bike ride called Pedal Pittsburgh four Sundays from now. A 35-mile trek up a couple of Pittsburgh's more ferocious hills. I'm scared because they are not calling it a race. Without the word race in the title, it seems more of a "can you finish." We were going to try the 60-mile, but after last weekend's training session, we scaled it back.

Sunday morning, he sat down at the computer to map out that day's ride. He likes maps and I like that he likes maps. I, more often than not, fly by the seat of my pants.

See, we'll go up this hill, he told me and showed me the route we would take.

"It won't be a long ride," he said. He must have been thinking of the weekend before when I insisted, to anyone who would listen, that we had ridden ridden 50 miles. Later we measured and I realized he might have been right. It was actually closer to 15.

But I had trained in the intervening week. During my lunch hour, I had walked and run laps at Washington & Jefferson track. I was definitely in better shape now. Definitely.

"Let's do a longer route," I said. "I've been running."

Half-way up the longest hill I've ever ridden a bicycle up in my life, fire shooting through my legs, I started chanting to myself. Just don't look up. Just don't look up. We rounded a bend and I looked up. Tears came then. I saw nothing but a ribbon of asphalt stretching to the horizon.

I made it to the top where he was waiting for me.

"See, every workout I do, I try to remind myself that I'm not in as good a shape as I think I am," he said.

This may be where we differ. Every workout I plan is geared only at making me feel in better shape than I actually am. I've never ridden past the pain. I've only ridden to the nether reaches of the pain, and only then when other people are watching.

Left to my own means, I sometimes pack my workout clothes, drive to the aerobics place and then drive past it and into the parking lot of the nacho place.

Pray for me.