The Hill

You all know a hill like this.  The hill where you'll end up at 60 mph at the bottom if you don't hit the breaks on the way down.  The hill where cops love to sit at the bottom because the speed limit is 40 mph and you can't see them until it's too late.  The hill where people tailgate you if you try to go 45 mph to avoid a ticket.  The hill that makes you consider another way to work when it get icy.  The hill that makes you actually feel bad for the people biking or running it.

I ran that hill this morning.  I hear so much about "hill training" during half/full marathon training that I decided I should at least try it once.  I also wanted to run it so that 1) I could say I ran it, and 2) I could use my GPS running app (Map My Run...highly recommended) to see what the elevation change is.  It turns out the elevation gain is 197 feet (186 of it in a 1-mile span.)  Looking at the numbers now it doesn't seem too bad, and I know this is nothing for those of you that run trails in the mountains, but it was pretty brutal this morning.  Of course the 83 degree weather (at 9am!) didn't help much.  Anyway, as bad as it was to run up it was just as nice to run down.  I ended up going a total of 3.4 miles today in 32:55 for an average pace of 9:41 min/mile which isn't too bad considering my pace up the hill was anywhere from 9 to 11 min/mile.

Here's the elevation chart for my run this morning compared to my typical route:

For the week I ran 13.42 miles and I'm up to 25.63 miles in July.  I need to start upping the distance of my "long run" for the week.  So far my longest run has been 6.23 miles so I need to get up to 7 or 8 by the end of the month.  The problem I'm having is that it's hard to find 1.5 hours to go for a run when it's not 90+ degrees.  I guess I'm going to have to get up at 5:00am some morning and knock it out.  Ideally that would be on a weekend because after running for that long I'll be down for the count.

We're going to Montana next week for the annual Van Voast family reunion at Flathead Lake.  We'll see if I'm able to get some running in while we're on vacation for 10 days.

OK, it's time to get interactive.  Please feel free to add comments/questions/thoughts.  Here's a few questions to get things started:

Do you have plans for a summer vacation?  If so where are you going?
Do you have a speed trap hill that you have to drive on a lot?  Have you ever received a speeding ticket there?