Some lunatic wrote:
The Mt Washington road race is hilly.
The race course rises 4650 vertical feet from start to finish. It is a steep mountain course with an average grade of 11%, all uphill after the first few hundred yards.
Ha! That sounds brutal. Do they take a bus down?
bring me hills wrote:
NET elevation GAIN of 10 meters per kilometer (roughly 25 feet per mile).
Any loop courses (ie Start/Finish at same spot) do not qualify.
25 feet per mile is small stuff, I'd say 50 to 100 would qualify as moderate to hilly respectively.
And the loop thing? So Pikes Peak marathon with 7800 vertical does not qualify because it has the same start finish area?
Huh.
To me a hilly course is any course that is not pancake flat. Any deviation from the latter is not going to yield a PR...assuming your current PR was set with similar fitness on a pancake flat course.
bcgnfgn wrote:
To me a hilly course is any course that is not pancake flat. Any deviation from the latter is not going to yield a PR...assuming your current PR was set with similar fitness on a pancake flat course.
Thanks. It was my first hm and I tried to be very conservative... now i am looking for a flat course.
Maybe, but look at some of the times run at the old Cascade Runoff or Utica Boilermaker 15Ks. Both courses have substantial uphill (like 500 feet or more) on over the first few miles (it was about 5 at Cascade) but the final miles on those courses are downhill and very fast. The AR at 15K has been at Jacksonville for the past 15 or 20 years, but if you look at the all time list you'd see a lot of very fast times on the hilly courses.
Grandfather Mountain Marathon is hilly.
I just ran a marathon with 1800 ft of gain and 2000 feet of drop. Technically it was net downhill but the problem lies in the types of hills. This course had some 1/2 mile long up hills then a 50 yard downhill bringing it to zero and vice versa.
To me the threshold is something around 75 feet per mile. And it doesn't matter if it is net gain or not.
boston 26.2 wrote:
Never give up, never surrender wrote:It is so funny when I here people call Boston 'hilly'.
Marathoners are such pu$$ies.
You have to admit that Heartbreak is, well, a dream-destroyer.
Heartbreak is incredibly easy. I don't see the hype; everytime I run Boston I finish the race and wonder: "was heartbreak removed from the course?" To be fair, I run a lot of trail marathons - makes the road races and their hills feel like running around a track.
Ok here is my course map/elevation . . . the last hill sucked
http://www.halfmarathons.net/course-map-la-jolla-half-marathon/