Dreaded Hills

Hills. To run them, can't really be described. I thought that I knew what it would be like to run up and down hills as a workout but they were so different than what I was expecting. I thought that I would hate them more than I actually do. Believe me, I don't love them by a long shot but they aren't as killer as I thought they would be.

Hills are very deceiving. You see it in front of you as you stand at the bottom and look up. Then you pump yourself up and tell yourself that you can tackle it. Then you're actually running up the hill and you get about half way up and want to stop. Once you're at the top, you're just huffing and puffing. The last thing you want to do is run back down and do it all over again. But as you're slowly running down to the bottom, you almost forget how painful it was running to the top. Then you do it all over again.

Today, Tracy and I ran up the horrible hill near my apartment. We decided to run hills in the morning since it's going to be 90 degrees today. So rather than run hills with our running clinic friends at 6pm when it's super hot outside, we decided to get them out of the way this morning while it was "cool". It felt like it was 100+ degrees outside while we were running. I checked the weather when we got back to my apartment, it was only 77 degrees.

So we get to the bottom of the hill (we did a 12 minute warm up run prior to arriving at the bottom of the hill). It didn't look that bad. It looked better than the Randolph hill we run with the running clinic group. Our goal, 2 sets of 4 hills (total of 8 hills). We'd previously ran 6 hills and 7 hills, so we figured why not just add one more. Big mistake! We ran the first hill and thought that we were going to die. We slowly jogged back down and got pumped to run up again. By the time we made it to the top the second time, we really thought we were going to die.

After finally catching our breath and we're back at the bottom, we're deciding how many hills we're actually going to run given that 2 hills have totally wiped us out, this girl comes up and completely charges the hill. I mean, she's sprinting. Obviously we couldn't let her just show us how it's done. So we buck up and start the insanity again.

Needless to say, we only managed 4 hills before jogging home. (And the last hill wasn't even the complete hill, we didn't go all the way down to the bottom before turning around to come back up.)