It is one of my running goals of 2015 to run in Harriman & Catskills as much as I could and color the the trails I ran on the maps.
On June 1st, Wayne finally took me to the “Hill in Woodstock”. He has mentioned about this hill many times since we started running together, but we never did it. Maybe it’s because of the 2-hour drive. With in 1 hour range, we have plenty of smaller but good hills, too.
But this year, Wayne started to sound really serious about making a visit or two to this hill because I signed up for VT100, and he will be my crew/pacer. Wayne says I have to practice downhill running, and this hill seemed like a perfect place for that. 2.5 miles of pure hill!! Not steep enough for switch backs, but it’s steep enough to make me say “Geez, I need to walk a bit…” (I’m sure good runners can run up the whole thing easily, though. but not for me…just yet!)
I needed to walk a lot on the way up, but I tried to run down hard. I am not a good downhill runner at all, so it WAS a great training. By the end of 2nd lap, my quads started shaking. I have an excuse for the shaking, though! My legs were a little bit tired from 20mile run in Harriman (road) the day before! Harriman is not a flat place at all for road runnings, and I did the hilly part (Silvermine-Lake Tiolati) twice! Anyways….The plan was to do at least 2 laps, and see how I would feel. I was feeling okay enough after the 2 laps, so we decided to add one more. To meet Wayne on the way down, I cut the last part of the trail by half mile, so the last lap was only 4miles.
My knees and quads are in good pain when I got back to the bottom of the hill. We wished it could have been sunny, not drizzling, but the temperature stayed cool, so I think it was a great training day after all.
The trailhead is located about 2.5miles from the center of the town. The road IS hilly too. REALLY HILLY. I think hilly roads are much worse than hilly trails. You feel guilty on walking those road hills, but not much on the trail hills, right?
The plan for the next time is to run the “whole thing” including the road part.
I do not want to imagine the pain yet, but it seems like a fun training!
Ayakomaru runs 