A rather hilly trail this past week

There are people that enjoy the hills and people that enjoy the flats. I prefer the flats but there are others that I guess enjoy the burn on their legs as they trudge up a hill and then have to be proposed with the dangers of faceplanting as they descend that same hill.

In Chiang Mai, there are a lot of mountains so some of our Hares (the people who set the trails) seem to go out of their way to find as many hill climbs as possible. Are they trying to punish us? Probably. Does it take a lot more work for them to set up the trail? Absolutely.

Lately, some of our members have started using more technology to give us readouts of not just how far a run was, but what the shift in elevation was during the run as well. This is kind of neat to look at after you have suffered through it.

Now I get that 400 meters isn't exactly Everest but when you are out there in this heat and you go up and down 50 to 100 meters during a stretch of path it is a lot of work. It is much more work than it would be if we simply went around the hill and that was something that was definitely possible on this run.

The reason why some hares will do this is because they want to make the trail different than it has ever been before and since this is a location that we visit frequently, people have to get a bit inventive if they don't want it to be exactly like it was last time.

Chiang Mai is basically surrounded by mountains and most of our trails at least come somewhat close to them and there are other locations where we start at the top of them in some parking lot for a scenic viewpoint. Whenever that happens, you can be guaranteed that you are in for a hill-climb sort of day.

This is one good way to slow down the FRB's (Front Running Bastards) because there are only a handful of Hashers here in Chiang Mai that are even capable of running on this sort of ascent and several of our members have crashed and burned while trying to run down something like this. Thankfully, there has only been one semi-serious injury caused by it and the guy it happened to is one of our "tougher" members so even though the bandage around his head was soaked with his blood, he shook it off and stuck around for the beer circle afterwards anyway.

Just know that if you do come and do a trek / trail-run with us, that there is a relatively decent chance that you are going to be doing some hill climbs!