Rancho San Antonio, or More Freaking Hills

I won't lie, after my last post I kind of wussed out on the hills.  I'm short on time, it's a pain in the ass to park at the Stanford Dish, and let's face it, I'm lazy.  Plus, we had a few crimps in the training (a unexpected trip out of town, and then an unexpected nasty illness when we got back), so hills kind of got neglected.  Yesterday The Husband says, "let's go run at that Rancho San Antonio place after you drop the kids at school."  So I mapped us a 5ish mile course (it ended up shorter than I mapped it because we parked in a different place), we figured out how to get there, and off we went.

Much like the Stanford Dish, you start going up.  You see the trail, it's going up, so you follow it.  And it goes up.  And up.  And up.  It actually climbs up 610 feet over a mile and a quarter, just keeps going up.  Somehow, that sounds less impressive than it felt, and it felt like we were well on our way up Everest.  The view was pretty cool, though.

That's one hell of a view behind my sweaty self!

The Husband was a good spot, though he did curse me a few times.  "This is like where you bring your husband if you want to push him over the side," he said.  I reassured him that it was not part of the day's plan to bring out his early demise, and we enjoyed a brief respite from the uphill for a little while.  Then we went up again, and more, and more and more.  "I'm not running again until we get to the top," I said and I marched valiantly up the hill.  I could not muster up a nice heroic theme song to play in my head, it was a slow slog to the top.  We had to stop a couple of times to check the GPS, but I think when we do it again, it'll go much better, partly because we'll know what to expect a bit more.

Can you see the deer?  There were a whole bunch of these cute tiny deer.  This was near the top of the second major climb.

Overall, it was a really nice place to run.  We started on the PG&E Trail, cut over to the Wildcat Loop Trail, the High Meadow Trail ("I'd like the Low Meadow Trail the next time, please," I said at one point), and the Coyote Trail brought us back to the start.  A nice 5.19 mile loop with some very decent hills.  It also had a lot of people, so I can see how it could get really congested on the weekends.  We also caught a fear-inducing glimpse of the PG&E Trail further on, and how much higher it gets, and were glad to turn off of it.

Given what we learned today, we need to train up on the hills or it's very likely that Big Sur will kill us.  So if you'd like to put in dibs on my collection of lululemon workout clothes, speak now because I won't need them when I'm dead on Highway 1.