Holy Hills: A new workout

One of my favorite weather guys, a forecaster who does an extensive report each morning on the local public radio station, referred to tonight's impending bitter cold temperatures as being the result, in part, of the "persistent snow pack" that exists in eastern New York. The translation for us regular folks is this: "The stuff's not going away anytime soon." We still have more than a foot of hard, chunky, icy snow on the ground. With the potential for our athletes' getting on an actual outdoor track looking more and more bleak for the coming weeks, we need to branch out and find more workout venues. Some of our staple, outdoor, winter workouts -- Luty Loops, Accelerator Loop, Quiet Cove, Highland Rail Trail -- are getting stale or downright unsafe or unavailable. I refuse to cave in and have the guys go on the treadmill every day. Just won't do it. And so, on Monday, a small group of men's distance runners christened a new workout: Holy Hills.

The venue was Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel, a beautiful, 100-year-old church on the grounds of what used to be the Hudson River Psychiatric Center. Our Lady of the Rosary is the chapel of our parish, St. Peter's of Hyde Park, the oldest parish in New York State. Father Garisto, our pastor, found the chapel in the late 1990s when he was reassigned here after spending many years on Staten Island. Both the chapel and the parish itself were in a terrible state of disrepair. Through his impassioned and faithful leadership, he restored this jewel of a church from a ransacked, abandoned building filled with junk into the place where our children -- and hundreds of others -- have celebrated their sacraments. Our youngest son, James, will make his first Holy Communion there in early May, when presumably the snow will have melted. It is a truly awe-inspiring old stone church, in a quiet setting in the middle of the woods. Beautiful.

As most know, the Psych Center closed about a decade ago. After several generations of runners -- myself included -- ran hundreds of miles in and through the Psych Center, those runs, loops and workouts were shuttered along with the old, formerly thriving, state hospital. The grounds are off limits; like, seriously: You will get arrested if you try to trespass. However, the road to the chapel is open, and it is virtually unused during weekdays. I asked Father if we could do hill repeats starting from the chapel parking lot, since the road is private property of the parish. He gave his blessing (pun most definitely intended), and away we went. It was cold (duh, what else is new around here?) but sunny, and the guys did four repeats up and down. One way up was .62 miles, according to Justin Tampellini's GPS watch -- that's roughly 1km up and down, so the entire workout was about 8km.

Most importantly, Holy Hills gives us yet another option in our arsenal, as we wait patiently for the "persistent snow pack" to be sent packing by the warm weather that allegedly should be coming at some point.