Learn to embrace the pain of climbing - its good for the soul, the heart, and the weight. Look at the hills as an opportunity to discover new levels of self determination. If you set mind and heart to it you can develop a very healthy love/hate relationship with hills.
All that said, there are simple things to do to build up your hill torrence - first make sure you have the right gearing on your bike. So what are you riding for front and rear gearings? are you riding a compact or a triple crankset? If your not doing this you might want to puts some funds into changing it out. I ride 50/36 compact but there are days when I wish my 36 was a 34 tooth instead.
What is the rear cassette spread? I ride an 11-28 SRAM 9-speed cassette and love it. I like the 11 for the 40+ mph downhills and when the road gets really steep I like to be able to sit down and just churn up the hill in my 36- 38 gearing. what was interesting to me is that al lower speeds my 34 -28 combo works out to be 1 mph for every 10 rpms as I get up over 7 mph that starts to diverge some but still - 80 rpms works out to right around 8 miles per hour.
Once you bike is set up properly for climbing hills than its much easier to start working on building the right sets of techniques, muscles (leg and heart), and mental fortitude it takes to enjoy the climb. THe best advise I ever read about how to learn to enjoy the Zen of hill climbing was to just go slow until you can go faster. I don't know about you, but I'm not usually racing to get somewhere so on days when my legs or head aren't there I just go slow until I gt to the top. Other days I really push it hard and when I get to the top of my last climb home (a 1.8 mile limb with gradient of between 6-12%) I'm praying for a red light when I get to the top. But either way - the hills hurt so good
