Hills := Hell

Distance: 8.25 mi.

Kicked myself in the butt to go running this morning. My brain kept looking for excuses not to do it: I'll go tomorrow, my heel hurts (see Kenway's post about our last climbing trip), etc. In the end, will won over laziness and I set out for a longuish run with a goal of improving my time. My goal was a pace below 9 min/mi (and I was secretly hoping for 8:30): FAIL. Not even close.

I had scouted the route once before on runningmaps, but I had forgotten how much elevation it had. So I was fine for the first 3 miles, with a pace of 8:35 min/mi (with already about 400 feet of elevation gain and 400 feet of elevation loss), but the hills kept on coming. The next split is where I started falling apart, you can see the details here http://connect.garmin.com/activity/358244715. At mile 3.6, I almost gave up, but I was confused enough that I did not realize I was less than half way and could have turned around otherwise I think that's what I would have done. I was reminded of Murakami who at a few points in his book, when describing a difficult race, says: "but at least I did not walk." That carried me through, and gave me the fuel to finish.

In the end I did a 9:11 min/mi pace, with about 800 feet up and 800 down. I compared to my previous run of a similar length on hilly terrain (http://themonkey.club/2013/07/hiting-hills.html) and it actually looks like improvement (my pace was 9:39), so its not a complete failure.

An hour later I did my 18 burpees.

And for the record our pace yesterday morning was 10:19.