The Dish and Hills

"The Dish", as they call it, is one my favorite places in Palo Alto.  It's a 3.5 mile hilly loop in the Stanford foothills.  It got its nickname because there is a big ol' Satelite Dish off the trail.

I've walked The Dish many times.  Espescially in the summer and espescially when I was on my mini retirements.  It's just a fun way to get exercise and get some sun.  [Obviously this picture was taken when I was getting more sun cause I have a little bit of a tan...]

 

All the times I've walked this thing, there will be a few people that will go speeding by me as they run on by up those crazy hills.  I would always think to myself that some day I should really try running that thing. 

This might be a good time to tell you - I hate running hills.  HATE it. I'm just not good at it.  My heart races like a crazy maniac.  And I think when I'm trying to get myself up the dang hill that I forget to breath so then I start panting like a crazy person.  So, I tend to avoid hills when I go for runs.

But then I got an email from the Antarctica Marathon director in early January that said this.... "How is your training going? Run hills, hills and more hills! It is a strength runner's course with lots of ups and downs."

Ugh!  Not what I wanted to hear.  And of course, there is no elevation chart or anything on the website because the course changes pretty much every year depending on the weather conditions and where we are allowed to run.

But I still googled..and found this from someone that ran it in 2007 - yep...lots of ups and downs.

I guess the only saving grace is that besides those 2 big spikes they don't look like they are too big of hills....but they do look a little steep.  After realizing this - I started freaking out about hill training.  So i've been trying to incorporate the dish into my workouts.  This is a 6.3 mile run that I do every week that incorporates the dish and you can see the elevation at the bottom...

I'm really hoping that running The Dish is going to prepare me enough for Antarctica.  On my long run last week, I ran it twice.  I'm thinking on my run this weekend that I might try to do it at least 3 times.  Hills = Evil to me.  And good always conquers evil, right? :)