What a Difference a Little Elevation Makes

Last weekend I was in Spokane, Washington for my grandpa's 80th birthday party and didn't want to skip out on my easy run on Saturday. After breakfast and helping my mom get ready for the big event, I put on the shoes and ran over to Bear Lake, which is where my high school's X-C course is. Because I was running the course I ran in competition for four years and because Bear Lake only sits at 1,800 feet above sea level, my easy run was about a minute per mile faster pace than my normal runs around 4,700 foot Idaho Falls.

Contrast that run with yesterday's run. I decided to run up the Sunnyside Road hill east of Idaho Falls. I figured I was ready after all the running I did this summer and wanted a difficult run in preparation for the Zeitgeist Half-Marathon on November 1st. Well, I bit off a bit more than I could chew. That hill is a brutal, soul-crushing sonuvabitch. It just keeps going up. When my phone chimed that I'd hit four miles and I realized I was only 2/3 of the way to the top and it was getting steeper, the voice in my head that had been saying, "I think I can..." started screaming, "Turn back before you die".



I did make it to the top, but I really paid for it going back down. It felt like I couldn't catch my breath and my legs just wouldn't work anymore. I had to stop and walk a lot and pretty much quit even trying to run about a mile from the car. I'm hoping it was just the high elevation (6,900 feet at the top), being somewhat dehydrated and only getting a few hours of sleep the night before. Otherwise, the Zeitgeist isn't going to be pretty. In any case, I'm not going to run that hill again for a while.