The hills are alive with the sound of me gasping for breath and begging for a golf cart to take me the rest of the way.

I'm starting to get pretty nervous about the 5k on May 1st.  It's less than 2 weeks away and I thought I was ready.

Ready, that is, until we drove the course yesterday and I realized that the entire first mile is UPHILL.

The 3/4 mile loop that  I normally run is a mix of flat, uphill, downhill and even the dreaded long, gradual incline.  So, before yesterday, I was feeling that I could handle anything that the race course had to offer.

As we began to drive the course my husband was saying things like, "Wow!  Uphill!"  and "1/2 mile and it's still uphill."   "Well, that was a whole mile of uphill."

As he sensed the mild panic attack I was having in the passenger seat, he tried to convince me that this was a good thing. "But that's the way you want it to be.  You want the uphill at the beginning so you have the downhill at the end."

No, sweetie.  I want the uphill to be on another course.  Not this one!  What's wrong with a perfectly flat course?  Isn't there anywhere in the city that is perfectly flat? Or, even better, how about the downhill at the beginning and the end.  Is this too much to ask?

As I was doing my run this morning, I tried to focus on something positive to keep my mind off of 1 mile of uphill  and I found the perfect thing to think about.  In less than two weeks, the race would be over. And that made me almost as happy as 1 mile of downhill.