Hill Repeats

My weekly running has not varied much from the usual route since we have been here.  It’s two-and-a-half miles to the Fort Macon Visitor Center and a little over a mile to the Picnic Area, where I have been running intervals.  With extra loops around parking lots and return runs on the beach when low tide permits, we can complete six- and even eight-mile runs, even more in previous years.  I never grow tired of the Fort Macon road with its running/bicycle lane alongside.  It is the perfect place to run out here, really, except on the beach at low tide.

Today I felt like running something different, though, so I turned into Henderson Boulevard, the next road down toward Fort Macon, and explored a little.  It ends at a parking lot and beach access point, and there are some flat-top motels along the way, including the Sand Dollar with its hopeful “Daily and Weekly Rates” sign and Pelican’s Roost.  They were deserted this morning but I expect they are completely booked in July.

The next road down is Sea Dreams Drive, the entrance to a cute little neighborhood that ends in this row of colorful houses that we see from the beach, lined up like a box of crayons facing the ocean.

At the entrance to Sea Dreams is a remarkable house called “Bridge House,” which stretches over the road.  On most mornings when we run by, there is a little white dog standing precisely in the middle of the bridge and he barks furiously, no doubt a highlight of the day for him. 

The road climbs steeply once you run under the bridge, more steeply than you would expect out here, and then it climbs again up a longer hill, and back down steeply again before reaching that row of pastel crayola houses facing the ocean.  It was here that I decided to run short hill repeats this morning, back and forth, running hard to the top of a hill, then easing down the other side.  My friend Skip Taylor told me about the benefits of short hill repeats, and they are a great workout.  In Highlands, I run them at the top of Sixth Street, but I think these hills this morning were steeper than that one.

The only other hill out here is the tall Atlantic Beach Causeway that spans Bogue Sound, part of the course of the Crystal Coast 10-K and Half Marathon that we have both completed in previous years, one year in a 35-mph gale.  So it was nice to discover some surprisingly steep hills so close to the condo.  And it felt good to this mountain runner to be running hills again.