You Always Remember the Hills

When runners gather around the campfire to tell stories, they scare each other with tales of the hills they have had to climb.

While the other details of a course fade in memory, there's something about a hill that lingers in the brain like a trauma. I remember like it was yesterday how I felt going up the hill along the power lines on the old Turners Falls course In Western Massachusetts in 1975. Like it was yesterday! I also remember well the gradual rise up from the ball field at the start of the old Franklin Park course; the long rugged trail up and over Mt. Sugarloaf in Deerfield; the scramble up the steep embankment at Noble & Greenough in Dedham; and dozens of other climbs on courses around the state. Who has run the 8K at Van Cortland Park without having Cemetery Hill permanently etched into their psyche? Who has run Derryfield Park in Manchester without recalling every detail of the ski slope?

Each course offers something different, from the Himilayan ascent of Northfield, to the subtle undulations of Franklin Park. Each course demands something different, an approach to pacing and rhythm that will, when all the sticks are counted, separate the winners from the losers. A good course demands that runners take its particular challenges seriously or risk being humbled. Underestimate a hill and you pay dearly in the end. Overestimate a hill and you will be mired in mediocrity, a victim of "altitude anxiety" and a too-active imagination.

I think most runners who take to the trails feel that hills are at the heart of cross-country, the very essence of a sport that might favor the speedy but is ruled by the strong. There's nothing quite as satisfying as beating someone in a cross-country race who you both know could run you off your feet if the race were contested on a flat track. Needless to say, with my all-too-modest track speed, I loved cross-country.

That's why I love it when the All-State meet is held in Northfield, as it will be this year. That fact has been looming in the training plans of coaches around the Commonwealth. Teams are scouting their towns for hills that might simulate in training the challenge of climbing up the side of the mountain for the first 1000 meters. In addition to training the muscles, teams know they must train themselves to think of the hills in a positive way, as an advantage against the competition. Ironically, hills are the great leveler, allowing a team with less than top talent to come out on top after all. At the 2003 State Meet (also held in Northfield), the winner of the Boys team race, St. John's Prep, had finished only 4th in the EMass Meet the week before, and was arguably less talented than at least five other teams at the State Meet. Hills leveled the field, and St. John's Prep had the preparation and mental fortutude to take advantage.



Yes, hills haunt the memories of some, and brighten the memories of others.

I'll bet when the boys from Danvers are old and gray and sipping their brandy, and smoking their cigars at the club... when conversation turns to the good old days of High School Athletics, they reminisce together about Northfield Mountain and how even though it hurt so bad, it was very, very good to them.