no more hills!!

tonight was officially our last night of hill training - yeah!!

in celebration of our "graduation" we were going to be running up and down the largest hill in central park until the coaches said stop. yeeeeeeah. this hill, harlem hill, is intimidating when you have to go up on a "normal" run, never mind running up and down it. i remember when i was biking at the park in training for my ride last year how i hated that hill. and now...i can run it. ha.

tonight was also the first practice that drew made it too (don't worry, he's been running on his own). can't believe i didn't have my damn camera. it was fun to have all four of us. as i've known all along, we're a good little crew and it was cool to have us all together.

so we went from 90th on the east side in an easy warm-up up to 110th street on the westside. the idea was to apply all our hill-learnings to this evening's practice. we would split the hill in two - run the first 1/2 at a high effort level, the second 1/2 at a normal one, then recover on the way back down. then the next time, run the first 1/2 normal effort, and the 1/2 half on. recover on the way back down. ramon stood in the middle marking the 1/2 way point and lovingly harassed us.

i had some new aches and pains, but i'm chalking them up to the heels i was sporting for halloween. we did 5 return trips. after coming home and looking it up, one way was about a 1/2 mile, maybe a little more. then, each way up and back was another 1.3 miles. which means we ran 7.6 miles (at least!) tonight. that, is amazing. it felt, not like nothing, no run (for me) feels like nothing, but it sure didn't feel like 7.5 miles.

and i'm damn proud. nice work char, handsome and drew!

today's mileage: 7.6
total mileage: 168.7