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.

That's what I'm talking about.

There's something about running in this place at this time of year at this time of night that just makes me happy.

It's not winter yet, but it's getting close.

"It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place - everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it."
-John Steinbeck, "The Winter of Our Discontent"

For whatever reason (and there are a whole slew of possibles), lately I've been getting home from work frustrated and just plain angry. It generally ruins the rest of my evening and I wake up more worn out than I went to sleep...

...unless I go for a run in the evening. It seems my "Place" lately isn't really one special spot, but it's been running in the foothills east of IF while the sun is setting; especially between miles five and eight. There's something about running that seems to help me work through (or just forget) stupid annoyances. Like Steinbeck's Ethan Allen Hawley, I'm not really thinking about things, but at about mile five, when the western sky over IF is starting to change to a luminescent pink-orange, I start to get a smile on my face and I can actually feel myself relaxing. By the time I get back home, I've fully worked the kinks out, both in my legs and back and between my ears.

Could be it's just the endorphins - but I don't think so because I've had places like Hawley's in other towns. They've helped me deal with the difficulties of life and made me feel a lot like I have recently after running in the hills. But with running it makes me feel even better to be doing something healthy for my body as well as for my mind.

Now if Ethan Hawley were around, he would have heard a man tell of his place.