Konrad Shire (Class of 2018)
Photo by John Roemer
When it comes to workouts, people have often asked me how often the Hereford Cross Country team would run repeats of "The Dip," which is rather infamously known as the toughest hill on our Bull Run XC course. It's always surprising to see the reactions when I would say "not often -- we usually do harder hill workouts."
I then typically begin to describe Falls Road Hills, a nine-plus mile endeavor including the run to and from Falls Road. Of all the hill workouts Coach Roemer had me do, I found the Falls Road repeats themselves to be the second hardest set of hills. The first set is by Loch Raven Reservoir which some of my friends and I call "The Crescent." However, what makes Falls Road Hills especially difficult is journey to and from the workout itself. The run to Falls Road is tiring, but fairly manageable. But the run back to Hereford is extremely hilly. That, coupled with the exhaustion from the workout, makes Fall Road Hills the hardest overall.
Most of my Falls Road memories come from the cross country season when it was extremely humid. I did not participate on this workout during track, since my training at that point was always tailored to middle distance, my specialty. Therefore, I cannot speak to the spring, but during the heat of early fall, Coach Roemer would hide water jugs for us at the top of Falls Road -- quite a highly valued commodity during the vigorous repeats.
What makes Falls Road repeats even more difficult is the fact that the hill also becomes increasingly steep, so I would always tell myself I was halfway done when I was 2/3rds of the way up. Additionally, the finish cannot be seen until the majority of the repeat is finished. This threw me off when I ran this workout independently on a dark, rainy winter evening with Dillon Coffey ('18 Hereford) and Vicente Iglesias ('17 Towson). On the first repeat, the end seemed to be in sight so I began to speed up, but the obscurity of the evening deceived my eyes and I actually had much more left. This made for an extremely tough finish which did not set me up for subsequent repetitions. It was painful at the time, but it's a humorous memory that I'll never forget.