Running - Open Letter to Hill That Kicked My Butt

This pastoral view hides a sneaky heart of stone.

Dear Northup Hill -

You are evil - a doll-faced evil draped in the sweet sites and sounds of a suburban life, and hiding a dark soul filled with selfish bidding. Your ascent doesn't look so bad from the onset, but halfway up you become a mirror image of yourself - in the same fashion as alternate-evil Spock in Star Trek. Like the Black Widow of the city grid, you draw in runners and bikers with your tasty wide curbs and smooth pavement, only to mock us all mid-climb with a wall of high effort. Is this how your treat your friends and others who have come to rely on you? Shame.

I can see that you favor a life of tormenting others. Today, as I spanned your expanse, another runner was equally determined in her pursuit to get past your heckling ascent. You make leg muscles weak, and move the fast beating from the heart into the head. You make me weeze like an asthmatic. You have the hardest 1/4 mile that any sane neighbor of mine would ever attempt. The message is pretty clear - You want to me to fail. You're high-maintenance, and willing to do battle over the littlest challenge - kicking my butt for the sole pleasure of seeing me get physically tormented.

But despite your high-maintenance ways, I refuse to give up on a route that takes me over your stretch of my town. Our relationship - however dysfunctional - is vital to both my physical strength and my emotional health. I must own you. To conquer a hill is the right thing to do. You are in my way. You must let me by. No matter what walls you thrust in my path, I shall overcome.

And today I won, descending from top to bottom. You have not seen the last of me. Ascent will be mine.

Signed, Kurt