Taking the show on the road.

...well.  I may have found my new training route.

Tonight was football practice for My Pal. And since it was being held in the same town as our district's high school, I took the turn carpooling my kid and a few others. 

Practice runs for 2 hours and rather than sit and watch I decided to make good use of my time and run.  So I laced up my Brooks and hit the pavement.

Now My Baby Girl runs cross country as I have written about before, and this is the same town that she practices in.  She's told me about the different routes they run and how difficult they are.  Being her dad, I know there are times when she can exaggerate about things, so I figured her descriptions of these difficult routes were as well.

...uh, I was wrong.

Holy Crap!  The first thing I did was something they call "Watertower Hill".  I assume its similar to climbing Mt Everest!  I do believe the temperature dropped 30 degrees by the time I reached the summit.  Trees stopped growing about half way up.  ...get my point?  All I could think is wow!  If the cross country team runs that during practice, thats impressive.  And Coach Alderman is evil.

What goes up, must come down.

So then after dodging a few mountain goats, I started on the downhill portion of this hill.  Take a sharp left and you're met with a steep drop that has to rival some of the roller coasters at the Amusement Park east of our area.  I'm certain that whatever time I lost due to the incline, I made up on the decline!  Even my RunTracker program told me to slow down!  I must have looked kind of funny as I ran with my arms straight up and screaming.

As I continued my run, I stayed away from "Watertower Hill" road itself.  But as the roads that run north and south in this town head toward the hill, they do have a pretty good incline.  Tonight's run was a real test of where I am in my training and stamina.  So what did I learn?  That wherever I run my races, it better be FLAT!!  

I remember when I took physics in school (yes, I know, shocking but I was kind of good in math) and we discussed things like inertia, acceleration, mass, and momentum.  As an object of mass requires force to move it up an incline, the force must increase based upon the degree of the incline.  

Basically what that means is that in order to get my fat carcass up these hills and inclines, it requires a helluva lot more power from the muscles in my legs, air in my lungs, and blood pumped by my heart to get this Wheezing Gorilla to the top!

whew...

I'm kind of tired just typing the post after thinking of Thursday night's run.  Overall it was a good run.  Its always nice to run someplace different than where you're used to.  Will probably do this route again, just for fun.

3.50 miles, 36:29

Later