June 24, 2012 12 Hot, Hilly Miles

today i was trying to plan a new route since i felt like last weeks was a little too hilly in one spot. the route wasn't really that hilly, there was jut 1 extremely steep hill between miles 7 and 7.5. i was trying to avoid that hill. i traced out a loop on google earth that was 5.8 miles, pretty close to 1/2 of the 12 miles i was supposed to run. from what i remembered about driving this route there wasn't much uphill, and to be honest, from what i remembered it was mostly downhill. WRONG. on this run, from mile 1.5 to mile 3.0 was just about all uphill. then there was .5 miles of nice shaded downhill. then another mile of mainly uphill. at mile 4 i had to stop and walk to finish the hill, it was very hot and the hills were getting to my legs. miles 4.5 to 5 were pretty level and 5 to 5.8 were mostly downhill and back at my driveway. instead of making the loop again i decided to run 1.6 miles away from the driveway back to the driveway then 1.5 miles away from the driveway then back to the driveway to end. the main reason i was doing this was to avoid any really big hills. i felt pretty good and my splits were ok but i didn't feel like my heart or legs could take any more of the steep long hills. so i finished, feeling pretty good, in 2:16.37 which is a pace of 11:23. that isn't great but in this heat i am pretty pleased. it was 97 degrees when i left the house, it was a bit cooler when i finished. i planned to finish about 20 minutes after sunset, where you can still barely see outside. as i finished i just had to turn on my headlamp. it was also much cooler when i finished than when i started. thought of the day: you should always drive a new route before running it. i hadn't driven this route in a month or so and probably have only driven it 4-5 times in my life. i still probably would have attempted it, or maybe not, the hills from today were not quite as steep as the one from last week but today's hills were much much longer. i guess the main idea is just run, somewhere. if you run the hills you will be stronger, if you don't, you are still running the miles and you may not kill yourself :).