Hannibal Cannibal

It'll eat you up is the slogan...and it did. Big ass mean hills throughout the entire course. We're talking about only 1/2 mile of flat ground through the entire race. These hills were monsters, each one was bigger than the last one, and just when you thought the worst was over, you reached the turnaround point and had to do it all again.
As if that weren't bad enough already, at the bottom of what I thought was the last hill coming back into the finish area, they were diverting racers into this little park on the side of the river...and let me tell you...it wasn't so we could admire the lovely view of the river. That little park had the biggest freakin' hill I'd ever seen. This bad boy had to climb at least 100-150 feet within a 2/5 of a mile. There were not too many people running this hill. In fact, I'd say 90% of the people I saw on the hill were walking it. I kept running, because I have this serious mental block to walking and I knew that I'd beat myself up for walking it the rest of the day if I gave into the hill.
Now granted, my pace dropped significantly (from about an 8:45/mile to a whopping 14:00/mile)...but I was still running, and that's all that really mattered at that point. I so wish I would have had a camera to take a picture, because I just cannot do this hill justice with mere words.
Anyway, I finished the 10K in 58:20, which is a bit slower than I wanted to finish in, but considering the hills I'm pretty happy with that time.
Then I did a slightly faster additional 3.8 through the extremely flat riverside portion of the town. So that makes ten miles total for me today, at what averaged out to a 9:00/mile for the entire run.
So, in summary, Hannibal is not a good town to run through if you don't like hills, but it's fun to run one race there each season, just to be able to have done it.