When I built my training plan back in April, I listed my weaknesses before I ran a single mile of it. Hill and elevation experience was at the top of that list, and I gave it a two word label: known limiter.

Twenty weeks later it's still a known limiter. Same words, same status, and now nineteen days to the start line.

This is the post where I account for that, because the whole point of writing this down every week is to give a real record of what this training actually looked like, and not the version where everything went according to plan. This is my first race at marathon distance or longer in ten years, and my first 50k on terrain anything like this.

Grindstone 50k is 5,020 feet of climbing over 32 miles.

I live in Northeast Ohio. The only thing resembling a sustained climb within a reasonable run of my house is a highway overpass. I have not run a single one of them.

That's the gap. It isn't subtle and it was never going to close by accident.

Before I get to what I missed, I want to be clear about what I didn't miss, because this isn't a story about slacking off.

Through July and August I held fifty to sixty mile weeks, week after week, on top of a full-time job, three kids, and two coaching jobs. I did the interval block. I did the steady state block. Two weeks ago I ran a full three hour dress rehearsal with the entire race kit, which I wrote about last week.

With two exceptions, I followed the plan I built in April pretty closely. One miss was the tempo block, which I wrote about at the time. The other is the subject of this post.

The volume happened. The engine got built.

What didn't happen was hills.

Here's the actual total, and I'm going to state it plainly because softening it would defeat the purpose of this post. In twenty weeks of training for a race with 5,085 feet of climbing, I did one treadmill workout with elevation, and one week of hill running while on vacation in San Diego.

That's it. That's all of it.

There were two ways to fix this from where I live. Only one of them was actually shut.

Driving to real hills. There is genuine elevation about forty-five minutes from me. On paper this is the obvious answer, and it's the answer everyone gives when I describe the problem. But add ninety minutes of round trip driving to a long run that's already two and a half or three hours, and you're asking for the better part of a day. My weekdays end at five, hard, because that's family time and I don't move it. Weekends have their own claims on them. I never found that block, and I never went. Not once, all summer.

The treadmill. This one was open the entire time, sitting in my house, and I walked past it for twenty weeks.

I want to be careful here, because there is a real reason and there is also an excuse, and they sound similar.

The real reason is this: my long runs this block were two and a half to three hours, and I am not doing those on a treadmill. I know myself well enough to know what would have happened. The run wouldn't have gotten shortened. It would have gotten skipped. Given a choice between doing the miles outside and not doing them at all, doing them outside wins every time, and I'd make that call again.

The excuse is everything after that. Because none of it explains the shorter incline sessions, which were in the plan, which take under an hour, and which I simply did not do. There was no decision. No week where I weighed it and chose otherwise. They were on the plan in April and they were never on the calendar in July, and the distance between those two facts is the whole subject of this post.

The one useful thing about that week is that the elevation profile was closer to Grindstone than anything I could have manufactured at home. Four miles straight uphill, then four miles of pounding back down. That's not a bad approximation of what's coming.

In the moment, it felt better than I expected. That surprised me. I held a decent pace on the climbs and spent most of the ascent thinking the flat fitness was transferring fine. I had my down moments, but nothing that made me think I was in over my head.

The part I didn't account for was that there was no break. Four miles of uphill is four miles of uphill. On a rolling road you get micro-recoveries you don't even notice you're taking, and here there weren't any. Then the descent arrived and gave my lungs all the relief they wanted and gave my quads none of it. Four miles of braking is its own kind of work, and it's work I hadn't done.

I felt fine during. I felt it afterward.

The honest lesson is about pace, not fitness. I ran those climbs faster than I should have, because I could, and because at eight miles you can get away with it. At thirty two miles, with most of the gain in the first half, I can't. The thing San Diego actually taught me is that my instinct on a climb is to push, and that instinct is going to have to be overruled early, while everything still feels easy.

Here's what I keep turning over.

I didn't miss this gap. I identified it correctly, in writing, four months before the race, and then I built an entire training phase specifically to address it. The diagnosis was right. The plan was right. And almost none of it happened.

I think that's more common than people admit, and I don't think it's a willpower problem, because the willpower clearly existed. It went into the fifty and sixty mile weeks. It went into a five in the morning alarm, all summer, without much complaint.

What I've come to believe is that some kinds of training are portable and some aren't, and the portable ones survive a busy life while the others quietly don't. Volume is portable. You can move it to 5am, to whatever road is outside your door, to whatever gap exists in the day. Specificity isn't. It either has a physical address forty-five minutes away, or it requires you to want to do something you don't want to do. Neither one happens unless you go make it happen. I didn't.

Writing "known limiter" in a document felt like dealing with it. It wasn't. It was naming it. Those are different, and the plan doesn't tell you which one you've done until it's too late to fix.

So what now.

I'm not adding anything. There's no hill block I can cram into three weeks that does more good than harm, and getting hurt in early September ends this entirely. The plan from here is the plan: one more real week of work, then the taper, then the start line.

I'm going to go out there and run it. No special strategy, no elaborate contingency for the climbs. Most of the gain on this course comes in the first half, which means the hardest part arrives while I'm freshest, and I'd rather meet it with the fitness I actually built than with a tactic I've never practiced.

I know exactly where my gap is. That's more than most people can say heading into a race like this, and it counts for something. The course will have plenty to say about the rest of it.

Nineteen days.