I love running hills. There just happens to be a few races that have hills. Just about every cross country race has hills and the ultra-marathons (anything over 42km) seems to have them by default. If you happen to have masochistic tendencies it helps as well.
Silva Nortica marathon 2010 start. I'm the one in yellow with the blue cap.
Perspective seems like a good thing to mention in this discussion. When I say “hills”, perhaps some think of little ups and downs on the road. I mean elevation changes in general. Elevation changes over the course of a race, typically measured in hundreds of metres, sometimes thousands. It’s rare that a city marathon has even the slightest elevation change with event sales pitches talking of “flat and fast”. There are a few hilly road marathons that I have on my wish list but in general it’s all about going as fast as possible. Hills don’t lend well to a fast race.
I recently ran my first cross country marathon, the Silva Nortica. My finish time was 5:02 which put me very close to the back of the pack of 20 contestants. Something to note about cross country and ultra races in general, they’re small. There’s often not a lot of fane fare to the events and not many contestants. Five hours is not impressive in the city marathon realm where they’re typically tens of thousands of runners, actually it’s not impressive in cross country either but still a milestone for me. In my limited experience, I would call Silva Nortica the hardest and the most proud of a race I’ve run to date.
42 kilometers across the Czech and Austrian country side in the Silva race made my last marathon, the Prague International Marathon seem easy. The distance was the same but the effort necessary wasn’t even close. I’ll provide details on my Silva Nortica run in a later post, for now I’ll describe it simply as “kick ass” in more ways than my bum is willing to mention at this time.
