6 miles hills, Rancho San Antonio, Sept 22, 1:06

I had not done any hills for a long time, and part of the reason was that Srini/Uma's group had been running in the mornings, and early mornings are tough for me to wake up. "But, this Thursday should be different as the training program is coming to an end and I should run with the group for once in the morning" I thought. I acknowledged Uma's email and set the alarm for 5:30am for the 6:30am start at Rancho San Antonio. I also made it a point to go to bed on Wednesday night earlier than usual to help in early wake-up.

As circumstance would have it, my alarm never went off. Well, actually, it must have, but somehow the volume was so low that I didn't notice. When I woke up for a restroom visit, it was already 6:30 and too late for me to go to the run. So, back to sleep I went, and only woke up at my usual wake-up time of 7:30am, making it an especially long 9hr sleep! Alas, the case with me is that if I sleep too much, I feel sleepy the whole day. And so the whole day went -- a bit sleepy... I called up Manish and we decided to run in the evening. So, we started at the base of the trail at about 6.15pm.

I loved the hills workout! Immediately after the 1 mile warmup and stretch, we hit the really steep 0.6 mile stretch that makes you sweat like crazy and feel like you are walking up a 80 degree slope. I don't know what the slope is, but I bet it is never more than 30 degrees at its worst. There are various times when the brain wants the body to stop and just walk it up, but I managed to coerce my body to not stop but run with baby steps and short strides (as prescribed by the coaches).

After the 0.6 mile uphill stretch, it is a slow downhill for about 1.1 miles at which point we come to the beginning of the wildcat loop trail. This trail goes up but in a gentle rolling manner. We ran here for about 1 mile before it was time to turn around. I was feeling pretty good (it was quite dark by now and I was in the 'mood') so I asked Manish to turn around while I would go for another 2 minutes. When I later turned around, it was immediately a down slope and I twisted my right foot! Ohh, it felt so awful. I had to stop and gently massage it. Then I walked for a bit and restarted my running. I am so grateful that it did not seem to be a bad injury...

When I came to the point where Manish and I were to meet up to continue the run back, he was waiting for me as I had had to stop while tending to my twisted foot. Then we retraced our running steps and finally came back to the starting point in another 20 minutes. By this time, it was pitch dark (but only 7.45pm yet!) The twisted foot was still feeling okay and I enjoyed the run back. In total we did about 6 miles in 1:06. Pretty good I thought considering that we did the 0.6 miles uphill in about 7 minutes.