In which I try to garner sympathy for having signed up to run a race I'm in no shape to be running.
Running Up That Hill
On Training Run #5 I started walking just shy of the driveway to BCD.
I couldn’t imagine running up that hill. Which hill? If you’ve ever run the last leg of the Josh Billings RunAground, you know the Kripalu to Tanglewood hill. The Long and Winding Hill. The Jagged Little Hill.The Highway to Hell Hill. The Hilling Me Softly Hill.
But to be honest my run that day hadn’t been going well since Interlaken. I’d given up on running halfway up the hill there, too. I’d surrendered at the precise moment the tall, lithe, apparently native-born runner I’d greeted half an hour before breezed by me for the second time.
“You doing the Josh?” I’d yelled at her back in those bright moments of unwarranted enthusiasm, when I was still full of hope and oxygen.
She’d turned and stopped. “Yes! You?”
“Hoping to. Much more slowly than you, I’m afraid!”
“Oh, I don’t know about that!”
I know all about that. What I don’t have any idea about is what possessed me to sign up for this race again. What made me think that I— fifty years old, right butt cheek aching in a way it never had before, both ankles shrieking with every hit of the pavement, the skin of my left armpit chafing against my sandpaper tank top, trudging up the start to that hill—would be a good candidate for running up that hill?
I’d been a runner since college in the early 1990s, although “runner,” like my registration in this year’s JoshBillings, sounds a little big for my britches. Even in the best of times— the 1995Josh when I sprinted the last mile in a torrential downpour, and the 2013 Josh, when I beat my goal and finished in 58 minutes — I was only ever in real competition with the “You’re a wimp!” voice inside my head. I’d taken up running to tamp that voice down, to relieve stress, and to earn my chocolate chip cookies. I quit running in 2019 because my forty-seven-year-old knees were informing me every time I tried to stand up that they’d had enough.
But my knees healed up during Covid, and I’ve kept in decent shape, what with my regular long hikes with the dog and YouTube pilates workouts. So when I read on Facebook a couple of weeks ago that the Josh Billings organizers had reduced the distance from 6 miles to 5, shifted the course entirely, and had eliminated that last, brutal hill,I thought, “Hey! I bet I could do that.” I contacted the matchmaker, got matched up with three older gentlemen, one biker and two paddlers, filled out the forms, and started training. Three weeks to get up to five miles from none.Hard, but not impossible.
August 23TrainingRun #1
1.6 miles up Long Pond Road for the first time in three years, back 1.6 miles. 3.2 miles in 39 minutes. Felt very tired and went to bed at 8pm.
August 26Training Run#2
Pushed myself a bit further, did 3.6 miles back and forth on the HousatonicRail Trail, in 42 minutes. Felt good
August 28:TrainingRun #3
Another effort run of 3.6 up and down Long Pond Road again, to take a few minutes off the first effort. Felt great, and I congratulated myself with a glass of prosecco.
At this point I was thinking that five miles with no terrible hills seemed solidly within my reach. I sat down to Facebook and saw a new post from the Josh Billings organizers, highlighting a map that looked suspiciously like the old map, the one I’m too old for.
“Now that we have great parking at Lions Gate lot, we’re going back to the original run route for this year.”
For real? The original run route, with the original hill, plus 3/10ths of a mile for good measure? I comforted myself with a bottle of prosecco.
August 31TrainingRun #4
First stab at the route. I parked alongside the Stockbridge Bowl, ran south on Mahkeenac Lake Road, east on Interlaken Cross, south on Hill, north on 183. Then I turned around and did it in reverse, ran back, taking just a brief walking breather. 4.9 miles or so. Manageable. I still hadn’t gotten near That Hill, however.
And that’s how I got to September Training Run #5, my first attempt at the full course, and to finding myself five miles in, suffering the Hill Bottom Blues at the bottom of that hill, realizing that while my brain still takes me seriously as a runner, my body thinks that’s hilarious.
The Josh Billings is on Sunday, September 18.
Iwas planning to get out again today, but itning, and my legs are still sore from Saturday. I have twelve days topractice running up that hill. I’ll let you know how it goes.