A good run is made of many different components from your attitude to the weather, but perhaps the one that inspires the most chagrin for all runners is terrain. Now, terrain can be taken to refer to a few different things such as the running surface, but it almost exclusively refers to one thing in a runner’s mind, hills. To a non-runner, a hill might seem a strange thing to get so obsessive over. In response to that, I suggest that the next time you go out and come across a hill you take a moment and really look at it. Once you’ve done this you’ll quickly be divested of any notions of hills as a quaint rise of the ground and instead see them as the towering dirt and asphalt middle fingers to the sky that runners see them as. There is nothing after all that so breaks a runner as seeing the path rise up in front of them just after putting in a solid effort and pushing their limit.
Through happenstance of geology and geography I cut my teeth running in the Santa Clarita Valley, which is nestled right on the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. And by dint of living in this particular spot on the Earth, hills were an inescapable part of my daily running. At first I hated this, hills were something I despised and complained about bitterly. Every day the worst part of my run was the trudge up the hill back to school. Eventually, when confronted with an immovable circumstance you are left with two choices, accept it or give up. I chose the former.
Once I stopped treating hills as something to be avoided and despised and instead treated them as…something else, my running began to shift dramatically. At first it was small things. I felt better on my runs, I started to develop an appreciation for the scenery, and I began to enjoy running so much more. Then came the big benefits, namely my racing performance improved dramatically. It became a cycle. I’d have a good run on a hilly course and become more appreciative of hills and the more appreciative I became the better I’d run and so on and so forth. In time as my memories of hills became fonder, I found that I did indeed love running on hills. This has worked to my advantage considering I now spend most of my time in San Francisco, a city know for its (in)famous hills.
It’s kind of funny actually how something as small as shifting your perspective a little can have such a dramatic effect. Learning to shift my perspective in order to cope with things out of my control is an incredibly useful skill and one I am trying to apply more firmly to other areas of my life beyond running. I don’t know where I’d be running wise if I had never come to enjoy running hills (probably in Kansas or some other god forsaken place), but looking back I couldn’t have made a better decision. I am proud to love running hills.