15 Jan 2009

Ran the hills with Coach Chuck last night. It was... Well, first and foremost, it was COLD! But extra layers were worn, and all was okay.

The hill workout program is basically this: Find a hill, with about a 10-15% grade (I don't know what this is, honestly. I know you want incline, but not STEEP), and run up it. Run at about 90% your maximum speed, for a time of 60-90 seconds. The goal is to maintain the same pace, and cover the same distance in the same
time, with margin of error or roughly 2%. Start with 2-3 repetitions, and add one or two repetitions each week.

Chuck and I began with a leisurely warm-up jog of about a mile and a half (with one vaguely surreal pit-stop at the UofR cafeteria, where we interrupted what appeared to be Dance Team tryouts or somesuch), and then went to find our hill. This being my
first hill workout, I ran two repetitions up the hill. My first trip took 1:17, which is right in the middle of the goal running time (60-90 seconds). My second trip, I was shocked and proud to hear, came in at 1:17, as well! It certainly didn't feel like I was running the same pace, but apparently, I was. This is good, and I
will mark this down as a success. These hill workouts are going to become a regular activity for me, and will help (a LOT) toward my "perfect day" goal of finishing this marathon in under 5 hours. Yay!

The day before yesterday, I sent out my update email (some of you reading this likely received that email - if you didn't, but would like to, email me at davebessom@gmail.com and I'll add you to this list!), and mentioned the upcoming hill training. I received two great email responses to this, yesterday, which I found to be both motivating and inspirational, and so I would like to share
them with you here.

First, some great advice:

Never let something that does not move beat you.

My new hill-running mantra.


And second, some wonderful reasons to love hills:


Hills are incredible. This is why:

Without hills, there would be no fantastic cartoons of ever-growing snowballs barreling down on the heels of funny rabbits who always made us laugh on Saturday mornings while we wore our snuggly-footie pajamas. Without hills there would be no mountains. Without mountains, Julie Andrews would not have had a place to sing on her days off from the Abbey. She'd have to, like, go buy cheese or something on her days off. If we didn't have hills, there would be no opportunities to go downhill sledding in the winter. If there were no sledding opportunities, there would be no need for hot cocoa to warm your chilly-bones after sledding all day. Can you
imagine a world without hot cocoa? I can't. It would be a dark, dismal place. See? Without hills, life would be crap. ;-) You're a lucky, LUCKY man, Dave Bessom, to spend the evening with hills.


I AM a lucky man to spend my time on these hills. Many people can't, and so I am running these hills FOR them. I'm honored to have this opportunity, and I'm loving every freezing uphill minute of it.