Hills... The breakfast of champions.

No offense to Wheaties, but cereal doesn't make champions... hard work does.

Today's workout called for 7.5 miles, and the plan threw in the option to "mix it up" with a little hill workout.  So, with the Holyoke St. Patrick's Day Road Race a little over a month away, we decided to take on the course.  Being that the race is only 6.2 miles, I suggested that we do the "Old" course.  For anyone that was running back in the 80's, Holyoke was unique... it was the only course in the area that was 7.5 miles.  Their choice to shorten the course was a controversial one, but at the time 10K was the "popular" race distance.  To shorten the course, they eliminated two substantial hills on the campus of Holyoke Community College.  Now this made the course easier, but it was still uphill for most of the first 3 miles.

We parked the cars at about mile marker 1, and began from there.  This made the first two miles uphill.  Entering the college campus, we proceed to do a lap (down, up, down, up), and rejoined the current course.  After about 1/2 mile of somewhat level terrain, we now hit the biggest downhill of the course.  It's so hard to hold back on a down hill, and that made mile five the fastest of all my splits today.  The final two and a half miles are pretty flat, and the only thing that we had to worry about were "idiot drivers".  One that we watched "pause" for a red light after flying past us, and another that cut over two lanes just to get into McDonald's.  I guess it was a last minute decision to get that Egg McMuffin.

All-in-all it was a great run.  My longest since the Disney Marathon, but they're going to get longer almost every weekend from here until Boston.


Today's mileage - 7.60  /  96.41 total for year.