Instead of getting Diana a Flickr pro account, perhaps we should provide her with some snappy come-backs. Reader suggestions welcome!

When I do hill repeats, I run fast up the hill, then slow to a jog, turn around and go down the hill to begin again. As I reached the top of the hill for the sixth time, a man passed by going the other way, and said:

Got all the way to the top, eh?

What does one say to that? When I am doing 15 repetitions, and he thinks that the reason that I am breathing hard is because it’s so difficult to run to the top of a hill?

I have a hard time thinking when I am running. I usually say reasonably incoherent things. For instance, one time I tried to say “running skirt” while running. I said “running shirt” and “running shorts” and just could not cough out “running skirt,” much as I could see the laughable item in my head. I also have trouble parsing the sounds that other people make into comprehensible words — this morning a woman said, “I wish I had your energy!” as I ran yet another hill repeat, and by the time I figured out what she had said, I had almost passed by and it was all I could do to say “yeah” — and my distance vision is significantly worse than usual. So, I am not at my most biting and clever when people say dumb things to me while running.

So I could not think of a snappy thing to say to this man who assumed that, because I was breathing hard at the top of a hill, it must be hard for me to run up hills. All I said to him was,

This is number six, got a few more still.

Are other people familiar with intervals? That “number six” doesn’t just mean “this is the sixth hill I’ve encountered over the course of this morning’s run,” but “this is the sixth time I have sprinted up this hill, and it is not the last”?

So far here, I have not been passed while running. One day a guy did pass me, but he was doing the sprint-and-jog routine where every time I came up behind him, he sprinted ahead, and then slowed down again, so I caught up again… I eventually passed him on a downhill right before his run ended, so that was the end of that. Last week I went to a track to do a few timed miles, and there was a family there running around the track. There was a young boy, about 10 years old, who ran faster than his younger siblings, and tried to race me every time we ended up running near each other. Somehow, even though it was during my rest interval, I did not want to be passed. So I ended up surging every time he tried to pass me. I do not like to be passed by anyone against whom I am not racing, especially not by 10-year-old boys.

I am too old to have that feeling about running. But driving . . . well, that’s another story.