The Hills

I've been to Valley Forge Park more times than I can count. I've walked the loop more times than I can count. I've even run part of the loop a handful of times. I know there are hills but they never killed me in quite the way they did last night.

I met Brian at the park and we hit the trail. I had forgotten my watch so I was depending on him to keep track of the 45 minutes of running I need to do. We warmed up by walk the first half mile or so and then we took off on the real workout part. He was doing his super fast walk and I was running with him. The first mile, maybe even mile and a half went fine but after that it was rough! I'm not sure if it was the hills themselves or if I was running too fast or if it was just a mental thing but I had a hard time keeping up any sustained running.

I tried, but it killed me, and Brian quickly pulled ahead of me and stayed there for the middle mile or so before I managed to catch up with him again. At the end of the second mile, which contained quite a few big hills, I swore I was going to stop at the top of the next hill and walk back to the car. Luckily, Brian was there to keep me from giving up and he told me I only had about 11 more minutes to go to hit 45. So I pressed on, running and walking kind of randomly until I hit the 4.0 marker on the trail. At that point, he told me that I could stop and I calculated that I'd covered about 3.5 miles in the 45 minutes. That's not great, but it makes sense considering that I had done 3.75 at home last week on the treadmill with way easier hills.

We walked together back to the car so the total miles for the day was the full loop: 5.5 miles.

I still can't believe how much harder it was than going on flat ground. I felt far worse than I did after six miles on Saturday. I'm really curious to see how the next run goes. I also think that I want to keep coming back to VF on Tuesdays to see how I progress on this trail. I know I can't get any worse (I walked a lot and not fast!).