Hills

After quickly agreeing to be a signatory to TG40's Hill Treaty, I realized that hills, like strength are one of my weakest limiters and clearly something I need to focus on in order to become a better biker and runner. Thank goodness there are at least no hills on the swim! And I acknowledge that there really is only one way to become better at them, do them.

So . . . I allowed myself last night to be easily convinced by running coach Brenda and TG SanDee to go to the Endorphin group run class where the focus of the night was hill repeats. The day before, when discussing my week's schedule, Coach Michael cautioned me not to take the hills too hard or I would struggle with Thursday's power repeats on the bike. Hah! I laughed to myself. Hill and easy are never used together in any of my sentences.

After a brief warm up around a hilly part of Tarrington subdivision, we headed to "the hill" to start our repeats. My assignment for the night - 10 hill repeats. Ten doesn't seem like a huge number, but because they are repeats up a hill, I feel like you should be able to multiply each repeat exponentially to come to the actual figure. From the bottom, the hill looked like the equivalent of the Byrd Park hill near the Nickel Bridge toll that I used to dread running up the year I marathon trained. And, my experience was no better. None of the hill repeats were "easy." I finished last each time, wheezed and felt like my legs might give out near the top of each climb. But, on a positive note, I finished ALL TEN and felt good that I had challenged myself to do them.

And while next week, I hope to head to Masters post work rather than the run clinic, TG SanDee and I are going to meet at an earlier time and avenge "the hill" for at least one more set of repeats. In the meantime, I'm headed out Saturday morning on my bike with Bart to find some of those hills that tortured me on last week's ride and see if I can make some progress on the mantra my old marathon coach used to repeat in our heads "Hills are your friend!"