Hills are unavoidable in running. They’re not fun. Most of the time all it takes is one solid hill for me to start questioning all of my life choices.
So obviously putting my name in the lottery for the Mount Washington road race was a bit of a strange decision. A small unhinged part of my brain has always wanted to run it…Mount Washington is like this amazing relic of New Hampshire. It’s the tallest peak in the entire northeast at 6,288 feet, it’s a total bitch to hike (but fun!) and it’s only an acceptable climate at the summit like, 4 days out of the year. (I don’t actually know but that seems like an appropriate estimation).
So Mount Washington has an auto road, and once a year there’s a road race that runs up it. It’s 7.5 miles (roughly) and the grade is steeper than probably anything I’ve run up before.
Only 900 people get into the race, and by some bizarre alignment of the cosmos, I ended up being one of them.
Someone on my running team referred to winning the race lottery as a “good news/bad news situation”, which is such an accurate description. When I got the email my first thought was “YAY!” immediately followed by, “FUCK.”
So now I’m training, and I decided to blog about the training process because it’s going to be so different from any training I’ve ever done before, and because I could use any outside motivation I can get. The race is June 20, so until race day, this is where I’ll be venting (frequently), celebrating (hopefully) and whining (most definitely).
Yay hills!
ONLY ONE HILL 