Every morning before Boulder wakes up, fifteen-year-old Octavio "Tavio" Reinholt clips into his secondhand Specialized Allez and rides Flagstaff Mountain alone. Three climbs, sometimes four. No coach. No team. No data. Just the grade, his legs, and a conversation between them that has been the clearest thing in his life since he was eleven years old. He has never thought of this as training. He doesn't know what else to call it.
The Long Climbs is a coming-of-age novel set against the cycling roads above Boulder, Colorado ? a story about a quietly extraordinary teenager who has spent years finding himself on a mountain without ever thinking he was lost. When Gunnar Fleiss, the watchful, unhurried captain of the Boulder High cycling team, spots Tavio on the road and recognizes something he can't quite quantify, everything Tavio has built in solitude becomes suddenly, uncomplicatedly visible.
What follows is a season: tryouts, early-morning training rides, and the architecture of a team Tavio doesn't quite know how to belong to. There is a data-driven coach named Milo who understands watts and gradient but keeps running into the edges of what his models can explain, and a friendship with Beckham that grows the way friendships grow between people who find words inadequate and motion sufficient. There are races ? a hill climb, the Inter-High, the state championship in the San Juans ? and each one asks Tavio something different about who you are alone on a mountain versus who you become when other people are watching.
But the heart of the novel is quieter than any result. Tavio navigates high school with careful, systematic attention ? cataloguing hallway traffic patterns, filing uncertain social encounters under unclear, revisit, missing the beat of a joke and finding it later, or not finding it at all. He is not broken. He simply experiences the world at a frequency slightly different from the people around him, and the mountain has always been the one place where that difference doesn't matter. The grade asks a question. His legs answer. That is enough.
What the season teaches him is that the mountain was never making him exceptional in spite of who he was. It was making him exceptional because of it. The same quality that makes him miscalibrate the lunch line makes him read a gradient the way other riders can't. He carries more. He has always carried more. The season is the story of learning what that means.
The Long Climbs is told with precision and warmth, in prose that moves like its subject ? steady, rhythmic, fully committed. It is a novel for readers who love sports fiction that cares about interiority as much as competition, for anyone who has ever found their clearest thinking somewhere physical and solitary, and for every reader who has felt they were operating on a different frequency from the world and wondered whether that was a problem or a gift.
The road up Flagstaff Mountain begins in shadow and ends in light. So does Tavio.
