Tackling the Hills

As part of my Boilermaker training, I've been doing quite a bit of hill work, along with some long runs that had built to 8 miles as of last weekend. However, I wanted to have a run that combined distance and lots of hills, just to know I could do it. So I had scheduled a 9-mile hilly run for this weekend, but changed it to this morning since we've decided to go out of town this weekend.
Since I really wanted to focus on distance and hills and not worry too much about pace, I decided to walk for one minute after each mile (good prep for starting running again after walking at water stops, too!). And when I was running up the hills, I just switched the screen on my Garmin to show the grade of the hill but not my pace. Let me say I definitely picked some wicked hills for this one. The hardest was at about the 2 mile point - a hill almost half a mile long (.43 according to the Garmin), and quite steep almost the whole time. Whew! And the worst part was that, just as the real climbing began, the road changed from asphalt to sloppy gravel (it was raining at the time). Luckily it changed back to asphalt before I got to the top, and finishing it on asphalt was MUCH easier; I was surprised at the difference it made. Around the 3-mile point, it started POURING rain, which actually felt good! I headed down a dirt road that goes along some beautiful wooded areas for about half a mile, then turned around. That part was really more like a trail run, since the road was basically mud and rocks. Then I looped around back down the other side of the hill I had come up, went on rolling hills for awhile, and finally up another monster hill back to the area of my house, where I rounded out the run to 9 miles in my neighborhood. Total time was around 1 hr. 56 min. (12:56 average pace).
Though it was a very challenging run, and I'm plenty fatigued now, I really felt TOUGH out there, scrambling up those hills in the pouring rain. Bring it on, I say!
One thing the last two long runs have taught me: I probably need to take in some more nutrition during those runs (and the race). For each, I've only consumed 24 oz. of Gatorade during the run, and I've had a few times when I felt like my leg muscles, especially calves and hamstrings, were on the verge of cramping up. I got some Power Gels today, and will try one of them on my next long one.