02Hills
The oak park hills, and how not to turn them into a workout
The oak wood above the Neris is the only real hill training in the middle of this city, which makes it tempting to treat every evening up there as a workout. We spent two years learning to leave it alone, and the running has been better for it.
7 min readWritten 10 September 2024Revised 20 Jan 2025Kaunas
The shape of the wood
Ąžuolynas is an oak wood in the middle of the city, old enough that the trees stand spaced like a room rather than crowded like a thicket, and it sits on a shelf of higher ground above the Neris. Getting into it from the river means climbing, whichever way you pick, and that single fact shapes every run we do there. The paths inside are flat and sandy, looping between the trunks to no particular logic. You can run forty minutes in there and cross your own route four times without noticing.
We use it on Thursdays more than Tuesdays, because the light lasts longer under the trees than it does on the open embankment, and because sand is kinder after a week of tarmac. From the river there are three ways up: a road with a pavement, a long diagonal path that climbs steadily for about eight hundred metres, and a flight of wooden steps that goes almost straight. Which one you take is the only real decision of the evening, and it changes the whole character of the run.
One long gradual climb, one short unpleasant one
The diagonal is the one we run most. It rises maybe thirty-five metres over eight hundred, which is nothing written down and quite a lot at the end of a day at a desk. The gradient is even enough that you can hold a single effort the whole way if you start it honestly, and the trap is starting it at the pace you were running on the flat. Everybody does that once. The fix is to take the first fifty metres deliberately slower than feels right and then change nothing at all.
The steps are a different animal: roughly a hundred and forty of them in two flights, wooden, with a landing where people stand and pretend to admire the view. Run at anything above a jog they become an interval session whether you meant one or not, and your legs will mention it on Friday. We go up once, at a pace that would look lazy to anybody watching, and we take the handrail coming down when the boards are wet. Nobody has ever won anything on a descent.
Said on the run
- The diagonal: eight hundred metres, around thirty-five metres up
- Start it slower than feels right, then change nothing
- Steps: two flights, about a hundred and forty, walk them if wet
- Coming down is where people get hurt, not going up
Why we run them easy
Hills recruit effort without asking permission, which is why a group that meets to run easy has to be careful with them. A conversational pace on the flat turns into a hard tempo on a climb if you hold the speed instead of the effort, and the evening quietly stops being the thing it was advertised as. We slow down going up by however much it takes, including to a walk on the steps when somebody has had a bad week, and we do not speed up at the top to make the time back.
There is a second reason, and it took me a year to say out loud. Once the hills become the hard bit, people start arriving with an opinion about how they intend to run, and the evening turns into an event with an outcome. Tuesday and Thursday work because nothing is at stake. Twice a year, in the middle of a spring build, three or four of us do run the diagonal hard, repeats up with a jog back down. We do that on a separate morning and we do not call it the group run.
Sand, roots and the fortnight of leaves
The sand under the oaks drains fast and stays forgiving in almost any weather, which is the wood's great advantage over the embankment in March. Roots are the price. They cross the narrower paths in long pale ridges, they vanish under a centimetre of dry leaves, and two of the three genuine injuries this group has had in four years happened on them within a hundred metres of each other. We run the narrow paths in single file after dark now, and keep to the wider loops when anybody is carrying a light rather than wearing one.
For about a fortnight every October the floor of the wood goes yellow and the running is as good as it gets anywhere in this city. It is also the fortnight when leaves hide everything: roots, the edge of the path, the gravel somebody tipped into a puddle in September. We shorten the stride a little without discussing it, run nearer the middle of the path, and accept that a lap will take three or four minutes longer than the same lap in August. Those two weeks are worth the care.
Said on the run
- Sand drains fast: the wood beats the embankment in a wet March
- Single file on the narrow paths once it is dark
- Leaf fortnight in October hides every root in the place
- Add three or four minutes a lap and stop worrying about it