Back to 'The Hills'

No, I’m not writing about Kristin Cavallari or L.C. or even Heidi and Spencer’s wedding. Despite the unmistakably crystal-clear fact that I am what the kids call "with it," I will skip past discussion of any MTV reality shows and stick to my running. (But if any of y’all bee-otches out there wants to talk some Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood, I'm down with that shiz-nit.)

Anyway, when I woke up this morning, I wasn’t sure if I was going to run today. I’d been feeling an occasional weakness in my right knee, including when I tossed and turned during the night. So I thought I’d reschedule my run for Monday. But after a couple hours up and about around the house, I decided to hit the road. Part of this was so I could hopefully do a long run on Wednesday instead of Thursday (because, don’tcha know, I’m in demand on Thursday), but also I was just feeling good.

So I leave around 12:45, which happens to be smack-freakin’-dab in the heat of the day. But despite being just four days removed from my overly wussified performance on intervals, the fact is I’ve been running in brutal SoCal heat for most of the past two months. And for the 6 miles I ran today, it ended up being no problem.

I’m lucky enough to live in a very hilly area, and my regular course starts out with what I call “the loop.” It’s roughly 2.25 miles, and starts out downhill for ¾ mile, losing 220 feet. Then the next 1.25 miles are uphill, the first part at a 20% grade, gaining 260 feet. The last quarter-mile takes things back to where they started. So I do this twice, turning off at that last quarter-mile to add another 1½-mile out-and-back, which naturally involves more hills. All in all, this is about 700 feet of elevation gain and loss over 6 miles. (We’ll get more precise as soon as I get my early-birthday-present Garmin on the case.)

I made the first 2.25-mile lap in 18:21, an 8:09 pace. By the time I made it around to my turn, at 4.25 miles, I was at 36:23, a 9:07/mile split for that second lap. Yes, I knew I was moving slower. I finished the run with a time of 53:58, giving me a split time around 10:00 on the last 1.75 miles. I did lose 15-20 seconds as I encountered some red lights and waited for cross traffic, but it really didn’t seem I was going THAT slow those last couple miles. My estimates of the distances may be a little off (for example, I think “the loop” is actually about 2.2 miles), so who really knows. But I figured out that I can measure my progress on this route. If I can get my time down under 50 minutes on this route (48 would be better), then I’ll probably be making a big step forward on my marathon time.

After I was done, I learned the temperature was 88 degrees, which, again, hadn’t seemed to have overly affected me. By the end of the night, my right knee was sore again, along with some muscles. We’ll see how I feel the next few days, but for now, I’m planning to go back to a long run (13 miles) later this week before mixing in a healthy dose of mountain time into my training.