Let’s face it: the only way to get better at running hills is to, well, get off your lazy butt and run them. Hill training is a part of marathon life, and if you’re not willing to put yourself through it, why are you running, anyway?

After all, hill training offers the following benefits:

• Improved running mechanics
• Speed
• Strength
• Endurance
• Confidence

I may be wrong. Perhaps not everyone needs to run hills to race. But if, like me, you are gunning for a Boston Marathon qualifying time, you’d better put hill running on your calendar or you will end up missing some terrific benefits.

My problem: I get bored easily when I run the same routes. Solution? Find new ones. I’ve compiled a list.

First on the list: after spending the night up at the Mt. Pinos dark sky site to rebel against the “fall back” time change and break in a new pair of binoculars, this place.

Old Highway 99, abandoned and unmaintained, once called the Golden State Hwy, but known today as the Templin Hwy.

If you’ve ever driven up Interstate 5 on your way to anywhere north of Santa Clarita, you’ve probably passed by a stretch of California highway history without even realizing it.

The Golden State Highway. Ol’ Route 99. And much like that stretch of US 66 near Flagstaff immortalized in the original Cars movie, largely forgotten. It was the path out of Los Angeles to points north, until the Department of Water and Power decided to create Pyramid Lake and the Johnson administration finished the last of the paving on the newly christened Golden State Freeway.

But the stretch I ran today still exists. From where I parked after exiting the I-5 at the Templin Highway exit, the road ascends a perfectly engineered 5% grade for two miles before dropping three miles to a gate accessible to the Department of Water and Power that leads to the dam holding back all that water at Pyramid Lake. The gate is open to hikers and cyclists; in fact, Piru Creek, which carries the lake’s overflow, is one of those hidden fishing spots no one wants to tell outsiders about, judging from the few vehicles parked at the gate and the dearth of campers, despite the available facilities. Taken as a whole, it is a monumental fourteen mile hill run, undulating five hundred feet up its first two miles, then down close to seven hundred feet over the next three miles to the DWP gate, and finally up again through the gate to the point where a DWP access-only sign warns you against proceeding any further.

A fourteen mile round-trip sun-exposed hell-beast of a hill run, a mosaic of broken pavement that time forgot. A pitted nightmare for cars (you will slow down or you’ll find yourself airborne sans an axle at one particularly troublesome spot). And the Highway Patrol loves it because after pulling you over on the Interstate, they can drive it back up to a secret gate that opens to their speed trap hidey-hole at a brake check pull out.

At some point, I will have to conquer the entire thing, but not today. On tap was an easy four miler consisting of two miles up and two miles down. A gusting headwind made the 5% grade particularly troublesome, and my upward run turned into a series of four half mile long hill repeats. But not to worry, I will run the entire 14 mile route. Because if I can’t, there is no way I can qualify to run Boston.

More to come.

This is how I ignore the whole “Spring Forward / Fall Back” issue.