Tuesday - Natural Selection

Natural selection is awesome, only the strong survive... But when you run by yourself, you have to survive the watch or the distance.
Another in-service day, 3 miles at lunch.
Headed out my normal trail head behind my house to the "workout" hill. It is a hill that is about 200-250 meters long and extremely steep. It's about 4 miles away so you get a great (hilly as a cuss) warmup. The idea was I do 3-4 hills with above average effort. Ideally I wanted to run the first one, then run 5-10 seconds faster each hill following. I did just this, 2:40, 2:44, 2:37... Then thought that 5 sounds way better than 3, and then I started thinking about my New England mountain crown that I haven't worn in a few years, and I'm pretty sure (and likely) to get it back. So I added two more hills to my workout of 2:37, 2:30. This does not guarantee my crown, but let's be honest, it strikes fear of inevitability. He times really mean nothing, but the effort was 80% and I left knowing I could have crushed a few more (literally, a few). Another 15, and feeling better than last week.