Here a Hill, There a Hill

Hill training in my neighborhood is not a problem. In fact, I struggle at times to find a run that doesn't involve hills. I live at the top of the hill which is actually the top of the top of many other hills. Many thousands of years ago, my hill was under water. A giant lake covered the land. Giant sea creatures swam in what has become my backyard and finding seashells in the area is a pretty common occurrence.
The other interesting fact is that because this was once a lake our whole area is built on sand.

Have you heard the "wise man, foolish man" story? If you haven't, in a nutshell the wise man built his house on the rock. The wise man had great construction and a man cave.  The foolish man built his on the sand, had a hallway that bows and wonders what the construction people were smoking when they built his home. Winds and rain came along and the foolish man lost his home, hadn't kept his home owner's insurance up to date to include flood insurance and consequently had to keep paying his mortgage on a home he no longer had....something like that....you get the picture. The wise man on the other hand, had calculated the annual rainfall in his area, built his home with a solid rock foundation and had a terraced yet gently sloping landscape that led the water away from his house. His weather monitoring device in his back yard kept him apprised of the conditions. Because he was prepared, he sat back enjoying the Cubs game on his 60" LCD HDTV with a frosty drink by his side and his wife making some fabulous Guacamole dip right before the 7th inning stretch.

Our house is on a hill, we don't have flood insurance because it would take a flood on the scale of Noah  to take out our home, but we do have earthquake insurance—thanks to the fault line that goes right across the mountains that we can see from our home.

With the Epic Relay approaching in a month, I felt it was time to actually run a hill workout rather than just have hills in my workout. When I told my kids the plan this morning, my oldest grinned–because he knows our neighborhood. Our street is nickname "suicide hill" because the kids like to ride bikes, skateboards, etc.. down it. With my plan in place I headed out. It's a completely different run when I am purposely looking for a variety of hills to run. I put in 4 miles of ups and downs that included some longer 1/2 mile climbs and some short 1/8-1/4 mile steep climbs. The short steep hills are all in my neighborhood so I ran them a few times after I had done the longer hills. I returned home a very sweaty and tired mess.

I'm glad I got out early because we'll be close to 100 degrees today. The mornings warm up fast. Saturday I am planning on my first 20 mile run since that blizzard run back in March. I am slightly tempted to run the same route just to show it who is boss. I get to map it out today. The good news is that there is no rain in the forecast.