With friends like these...

"As soon as one makes peace with hills, they do get easier. They become like a friend who always tells you the truth." – Patti Catalano Dillon (2005)

A few of us ran at Larz Anderson Park this morning. It's a lovely spot, and the view from the top of the ridge of the Boston skyline is quite stunning.

Brookline's course is very hilly. So what? It's a good course that challenges you in many ways. First, it requires patience. On many courses, the penalty for going too fast at the beginning is slowing down a little at the end. At Larz Anderson, the penalty for rushing up the hills with too much gusto is to kill your race. The oxygen debt incurred is too great, and recovery is impossible. Second, it requires courage. It's not helpful to dwell on the imagined difficulties of the course, but simply trust that training is sufficient, and you don't have to find the hills easy, just a little easier than the person running next to you.

There's an XC race I run pretty much every Fall that's held at Bradley Palmer State Park in Topsfield. It's also very hilly and I always look forward to it because I can beat people who are better than me on flat courses but have difficulty lugging themselves up the hills.

I like Patti Catalano's quote because it suggests to me that, as runners, we are constantly in need of someone or something to shake us out of our comfort zone. Hills do that with alarming efficiency. There's no coasting up a hill.

I have a training partner who likes to simulate hills by throwing surges into the middle of his 800's and 1000's during track workouts. It's tough to sprint for 200m and then settle right back into a fast 1000, but it teaches the same readiness that hills teach.

The meet is On Tuesday. Let's hope our friends, the hills, won't have unpleasant truths to tell.