By SARA CLIFFORD, editor

“If running up the roads in Brown County State Park on a Saturday morning, then back down them after a swig of beer, sounds like fun to you, then the Brown County Hilly Half is where you should be on Nov. 11.”

I wrote those words about the first Hilly Half two years ago, attempting to spread the word to possible participants reading around the state.

And I have to admit, as I typed, I was laughing a little to myself.

Sounds like FUN? Are you kidding me? What kind of crazy people do this for FUN? You want to know where I’ll be on Saturday morning? On my couch with a cup of coffee. Second choice: Eating chocolate with the Chocolate Walkers in town. Y’all have fun out there.

Well, I don’t know what exactly got into me — a bit of seasonal gloom, stress-eating too much chocolate, the realization that I’m nearing 40 and doing nothing good for my body, or all of the above — but a few weeks ago, I decided to join the crazies and sign up for the Hilly Half 5K.

[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]

Never mind that I’d never run for any reason other than survival or fear since my sophomore year of high school, and that was only to pass gym class, and it was nowhere close to the distance of a 5K. I had to Google how many miles that even was.

Never mind that I have asthma triggered by cold and exercise and haven’t had an inhaler for 20 years.

Never mind that I haven’t done any kind of regular workout since before my first pregnancy 12 years ago, and I’m now four years past my third.

I could do this. I could at least walk it. Heck, I live in Brown County; if you’re going anywhere it’s uphill.

Just to be safe, I downloaded a couch-to-5K app. It contained a training schedule for people like me who do nothing except sit all day behind a computer. But it was eight weeks long and I didn’t have that much time before the race, so I did nothing with it. Surely, I didn’t need to practice that much. And this couch was really comfortable.

Instead, for about two weeks, I took a jog down and a walk up my driveway nearly every day. A couple times, I took a kid or three to the Salt Creek Trail or to the high school track. Once, I challenged the big one, a sixth-grader who was on the track team last year, to about a 25-yard sprint. For the record, we tied, but he’ll try to tell you he won. We don’t need to talk about how my legs felt the next day.

Yessiree, I could do this thing.

I did not, however, plan to do it pushing a 4-year-old in a stroller. But when Dad’s working, Memaw is volunteering with a 5-year-old already in tow and the neighbors are busy, Mom is it. So that’s how I ended up at the starting line with my biggest kid, my littlest kid, and a borrowed jogging stroller that had never seen any actual jogging action on the absolute-coldest morning of the year, staring up at a hill that had never loomed so large.

“Oh Hill Yes!” my souvenir shirt read.

”Oh Hill No,” my calves cried.

We started off as if on a brisk hike — you know, on one of those normal hills that eventually end.

I wasn’t aware that this one didn’t, ever. We never drive this road behind the Saddle Barn through the park because it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. And that is true; the only place it goes is up.

Still, we were in a race, and I don’t like to lose anything even if I have no business competing in it. The three of us wove through the pack like we were on some sort of sadistic racetrack. Most of my phone photos are blurry because I didn’t want to slow down to focus.

“Look at that!” the big kid, Caleb, pointed midway up the climb. Leaves were falling and fluttering onto the course. They looked like flecks of gold with the way the light hit them. You just had to have been there to appreciate it.

“How are you doing, Henry?” we asked the one in the stroller. “Go!” he ordered. So we did.

For the first 10 minutes or so we were doing most of the passing. It didn’t continue that way. We pulled over — or rather, careened to a precarious stop at the edge of the winding road — for a few seconds to pull off a layer and I took some merciful deep, slow breaths. Maybe I should have used that training app. But we couldn’t let all the senior walkers pass us, so, still, we climbed, faster.

It was around mile marker No. 1 that I started to feel a little desperate. We had thought, from afar, maybe that marker was the turn-around. But then, I recognized it as the Beer Mile station, that stop-and-swig spot that I’d chuckled about from the sloth and warmth of my office chair.

“How are you doing, Henry?” I asked the strollered one again.

“I want to go home!” he wailed.

The 10K runners were passing us on the way back down now, and probably some of the 5Ks, but I couldn’t read their bibs, they were moving so much faster than us. Some of them must have read my face, though, because then, the encouragement started coming.

“You got this, momma!” one woman called out.

“You’re doing awesome, guys! You’re almost there!” another offered.

It was what we needed to propel us to the turnaround, where a tiny propane heater was waiting. I unpacked the now-crying one out of the stroller and we rested there for awhile, building each other up for the descent. “The car is down there,” I told him, and myself. “Can you make it?” We decided we could.

The trip back down wasn’t a whole lot easier, as I not only had to worry about the inertia of the stroller, but also the mood of the freezing-cold kid in it. Caleb and I tried to jog to get there faster, but that only made the wind whip harder, triggering wails of despair from the one whose only job here was to just go along for the ride.

I could have used that beer chug right about now. But I was so fuzzy and noodle-leggy by that point in the race that we just pushed on past it.

Finally, there was the bottom of that hill — but we weren’t done yet. We still had a tenth of a mile. And that’s something else I used to laugh about — 13.1 miles? Why does a half-marathon have to be 13.1? What’s one-tenth more when you’ve already run that far?

I now know the struggle is real. Between the crying kid, the ache in my entire lower half and the now-sudden lack of helpful gravity on that stroller, I wasn’t sure I could do one-tenth more even when I’d only done 3 miles. But I also wasn’t going to finish this race walking. So I dug deep, picked up my feet, and funneled into the finish chute at a respectable mom-jog pace.

We didn’t get to stick around for lunch, or for the post-race party, or to talk to any of the people I’d noticed on the course whose stories I wanted to gather. I had promised a warm car at the bottom of that hill and the little one wasn’t forgetting it.

But I’ll be back next year — just with not so much of an entourage. That was the only real crazy part.

The feeling of pushing myself to finish something I hadn’t ever tried and wasn’t really prepared to do, and doing it — there are really no words for it.

Oh Hill Yes, I’ll be back.

Editor Sara Clifford welcomes comments at 812-988-2221 or [email protected].