Hill

I had seven on Saturday and I wanted to get some hill time in since The Boilermaker has hills (thank you, Lara, for the frightening altitude graph).  Did I mention I’m running in the Boilermaker?  I am.  I put it on CRN’s race calendar.

The horseflies were bad again, although not as numerous, just more persistent.  I was able to squash a few that got in front of me.  Satisfying crunch, as Jank says.  There were a lot of folks on the path because the weather was nice, and I was happy to see people walking because the horseflies would give up on me to go after them whenever I passed a walker.

The running path isn’t quite seven miles and I usually run on the dirt road at the halfway mark to make up the difference, but this time I turned early so I’d have a bit left over to finish the distance with the hills.  There’s a very steep hill near the parking spot with a nice sidewalk, so I headed right up that after leaving the path.  Its about a half mile long so I think it’s a good hill workout for me.  And the sidewalk makes it safe to run there because the traffic is pretty heavy.

Right at the bottom of the hill is an antique store where Ketchum’s Hardware used to be.  I wish the hardware store was still there.  I miss the little grocery store that used to be at the end of the trail, where we would get popsicles sometimes when we had a little league game nearby.  There’s a long closed post office across the street.  When I was little we had one in our town too, just a couple miles away, but that closed as well.  There’s a new one up the road in the other direction that serves both communities, but it isn’t the same as the little post office with the small wooden mail slots with brass doors and one-dial combination locks.

At the top of the hill is the elementary school that I went to for grades 1-6.  It felt so strange running up along side it.  I had seen that playground thousands of times from inside the fence.  I had hung from the bars in the play structures.  My brother taught me how to do multiplication there.  I pushed John Schimerhorn’s face into the dirt there for making fun of me (the last time I ever was on top in a fight, by the way).  I watched Joe Lord steal kids’ lunch money from their lunch boxes and laugh at me because he knew I wouldn’t tell for fear of having the crap beat out of me.  I remember years later when there was a fire at the local Boy Scout lodge, he got his picture in the paper “investigating” the scene with the cops, and every kid in the neighborhood thought he was the one who did it.

Gah.  More ghosts coming out at me.  Shake it off.

I walked back down the last half of the hill to cool off.  I think this hill will be good for me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.