Week 3 Run 3 – The One With The Stealth Hills

Today was supposed to be a fairly gentle, unexciting run, where I could talk about the amazing progress I’ve made over the past three weeks and how this has been a rewarding and enjoyable experience. I was hoping to finish with a nice, warm sensation in my chest.

Turns out the nice, warm sensation was heartburn. Laura’s not done yet.

I decided to take a deviation this morning – I started out on a route I’ve done before, but at a T-junction where I’d previously gone right, I went left instead. This was about a minute into the first three-minute jog of the day, the one that typically has gone OK before the utter exhaustion of the second one.

Well, this week I turned left and there was a hill.

First, the case for the defence of nature. We’re not talking a hill that was massive in length – it’s a railway bridge effectively, so it’s only going upwards for about 100m or so. And also in its defence, it’s probably been there a lot longer than I have.

The case for the prosecution, however, is that it is a hill. One of the things I’ve been enjoying so far about the runs I’ve been doing is that Kenilworth, at least the bits that I’ve found of it, is rather flat by and large. I know there are hilly parts, but I don’t think I could get to one if I tried. Also, the part of the run that I was on meant that I had to run the whole way up this – and it’s not a completely shallow hill. It might be to people with fitness, but it’s the steepest one I’ve had to run up thus far. It’s my own personal Everest.

In this little courtroom drama, being in the role of judge as well as chief prosecutor and attorney for the defence means that, shockingly, I find the hill guilty of one count of being there, and sentence it to continue to be there but to feel very bad for so doing.

Alert readers (so myself not included) will notice that Laura has not been prosecuted for this. After all, I reasoned with myself with what remained of the blood in my brain, she doesn’t plan my routes. She doesn’t know.

The next thirty seconds were pleasantly downhill while my lungs politely reminded me of the joys of air, and then I took my next left.

And there was another hill.

Two stealth hills!

I know it’s not good grammatical practice to have single sentence paragraphs.

But there were two hills!

Two!

I think I’ve made my point there. In conclusion, there were two hills.

Note that this is all in the same three minute running window, the three minute running window where I count it as a win if I’m still alive after it when running on the flat. And I’ve been running up n hills today, where n is famously 2 (see previous paragraphs for a proof).

Fortunately I only needed to go halfway up the hill before Laura told me I could stop and go for a three minute “recovery walk”. I tell you, at this point I didn’t need a recovery walk, I needed a recovery gurney.

But still, I wasn’t blaming Laura. She couldn’t possibly have known.

And then the music for the recovery walk started. And one of the first lyrics was “You take me higher. When I’m feeling low.”

She knew.

I don’t know how she knew, but she knew. I was trying to be generous with her, even when I heard her story about pretending you’re running next to a hedge and not bouncing for the third time this week. But maybe it’s like one of those songs that you play it backwards and it tells you to choose a hilly route the next time you run, and to wire her £500 as a consultancy fee.

This whole experience (and some would say this is running uphill for a couple of minutes, why are you making such a big deal about it? To which I would say: fair point, hypothetical person who is astonishingly critical for somebody who doesn’t exist. But I’ve got to write about something) can be summed up in a poem by Robert Frost, which can be adapted slightly for purpose:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And after all, they both seemed flat.
Yet one was calm and one had bears
Who wanted to devour me there
And wear my remains as a hat. Of course, I speak in metaphor For hills and bears are not the same. Bears don’t exhaust you to the core And though with bears you may run more They eat you soon and spare you pain. I’d like to think that that was that Now I have time to tell this hence; Two roads diverged, and like a prat I took the one that wasn’t flat And that's made all the difference.

Right, I’m off to send £500 by online transfer, not sure why.

Hill Jogielka