15 miles and a bit of Boston

Talk about the Boston Marathon and everyone talks about Heartbreak Hill. It's a killer hill, the fourth in a series, that comes at 20 miles into the race. I like to be prepared, so have been trying to work out what it's like compared to hills I run in training. I found my hill, and today I ran down it during a gentle 15-miler. OK, it would have been more useful to run up it, but there's plenty of time for that. Actually, killer hill? Naaah!

OK, here's the science. I found a very useful profile of the course (easier to use than the pdf map from the race organisers) using a route mapping tool, based on Google maps, put together by a running club - the Houston Area Road Running Association.

Unfortunately I can't use the same tool to profile my training route, as there doesn't appear to be any height data for the UK yet! All is not lost as I have my GPS software. I've managed to size the outputs of each to the same scale so that I can overlay and compare them.

First up, here's Heartbreak Hill, the blue line, compared with Portsmouth's steepest hill: Glebe Park Avenue (I thought that would be a good place to start, given Heartbreak Hill's reputation):

Not bad - half the gradient, twice the length.

Next up, there's Portsdown Hill Road. It's a 300ft climb, steadily uphill for nearly 2 miles. It goes up the same hill as Glebe Park Avenue, which joins it half way up. The first bit, up to the A3M bridge, is rather steep, but from the bridge onwards it's not too bad. There's a crest about half mile from the bridge where there's a slight downhill before the road continues upwards. I've overlaid Heartbreak Hill on this half mile section from the start of the bridge to the crest:



Bingo! Now I know how to visualise Heartbreak Hill. I'll add Portsdown Hill to the end of some of my long runs.