Christmas Hills

Yes, I know it's a week after Christmas Day but, with traveling, I just hadn't posted this to my blog. Watching Clemson beat Nebraska (at least 1/3 of the way through the 3rd quarter), I have time to blog. [Hmmmm. In the time it's taken to write this blog, Clemson has gone from being up 21-10 to being down 23-21. Not good!]

We arrived late to my parents' house in Greenville, SC on Christmas Eve. By the time we got to bed, it was midnight-thirty so, even though we were doing Christmas late (breakfast at 8 and gifts at 9), I "knew" there was no way to get in a run Christmas morning. That was OK. But, I woke up at 5:15 and couldn't go back to sleep. So, off I went.


I only wanted to run 4-4.5 miles. There are lots of hills in Greenville and my normal 4+/- miler included some pretty bad ones. So, I used Gmaps Pedometer to plot a 4.8 miler that avoided the hills -- or so I thought. I hit mile 2.5 and had an Uh-Oh! moment. (The picture shows the middle 1.3 miles of the run -- the part with the Uh-Oh! hills.) I turned a corner and was unexpectedly facing a steep downhill. I may be dumb but I do know that what goes down has to go back up. Sure enough, about a half-mile later, I turned the corner and was facing a mountain! If that wasn't bad enough, I had a bit of a downhill after about a quarter-mile and then another mountain! It turned out to be a total climb of about 100' over a half mile -- @70' up over 0.2 miles, @35' down over @.1 miles, then @73' straight up over 0.2 miles.

So much for avoiding hills. Man, I was breathing hard after that half mile! I should have checked the elevations when I plotted the run.

Still, I got a good workout on Christmas morning -- an unexpected gift. I hope your Christmas run was good.

Run well, y'all,
Bob