Bernal

I like hill run­ning. There’s noth­ing like a good test of tenac­i­ty when out on the road. The only trou­ble is that tenac­i­ty isn’t easy to come by all the time.

Bernal is the largest hill I’ve attempt­ed to run up since I start­ed run­ning again this year. The ascent is near­ly 400 feet from Cesar Chavez Street to the top of Bernal. I climbed that 400 feet over the course of sev­en tenths of a mile, which aver­ages out to an 11% grade. I ran for about a thou­sand feet at 12% grade before Alaba­ma Street got steeper—the next 200 feet, which I walked, aver­ages a 24% grade. By con­trast, from home to the top of Potrero is about a 200 foot increase in ele­va­tion over six tenths of a mile—an aver­age of a 6% grade.

It was pret­ty hazy this morning—enough to entire­ly obscure the view of the build­ings down­town. But it takes a denser fog than that to com­plete­ly elim­i­nate the view. Had it been direct sun, I would have been over­heat­ed by the time I got to the top. I had almost hoped it would rain to cool me off more but even as it was it was a pleas­ant­ly cool morn­ing for a run.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly I felt a cou­ple twinges as I ran today. My joints aren’t very hap­py with me and I need to do more to strength­en them. May was just shy of a sev­en­ty mile month for me, which means I aver­aged slight­ly more than 15 miles per week. I’ve been tar­get­ing a 25 mile week late­ly but that seems to be too steep an increase. If I am to go with the «10 Per­cent Rule» (note the exam­ple in that arti­cle about what not to do—increase dis­tance from 15 to 25 miles per week) that means my June 1^st–June 7^th dis­tance should be 17 miles. My actu­al dis­tance? 17.2.

That makes it look like I’m doing it right, but if instead of June 1^st to June 7^th we look at June 6^rd to June 12^th—this cal­en­dar week—my total is 15.84 miles. It’s only Wednes­day. Even if we call this week the sec­ond week after doing 15 miles per week, my tar­get with the 10PR would be 18.9 miles for this week. That means that between tomor­row, Fri­day and Sat­ur­day I have to lim­it myself to an aver­age of one mile per day.

Real­ly, it does­n’t work like that. Even though yes­ter­day was a walk, it was still push­ing three miles. At this stage of my devel­op­ment I can hard­ly call that a rest day. So I have gone five days in a row with­out a real rest day. I was sort of plan­ning on doing a 4.5 mile club race tomor­row evening. That would brings my total up to 20.34 for the week and it would mean six days in a row with­out a rest day. Since my joints are com­plain­ing at me, I think tomor­row will have to be a day off, and per­haps Fri­day too. Then three miles on Sat­ur­day and start next week over with a tar­get of 20.8 miles.

I hate to give up the race tomor­row. I’m not will­ing to rule it out but con­sid­er­ing those twinges I felt I’ll have to be absolute­ly at 100% if I’m going to do it. Fail­ing a mirac­u­lous com­plete absence of aches or creak­ing joints, the smart thing will be for me to stay home from the races tomorrow.

I also need to pay more atten­tion to my mileage in the com­ing weeks and months. Part of the rea­son I’m writ­ing up these run reports is so that I will have this infor­ma­tion at my fin­ger­tips. But I nev­er both­ered to add up any week­ly mileage totals until today. Col­lect­ing the infor­ma­tion does­n’t help unless I actu­al­ly look at the num­bers. I have to do better.