Whoever came up with the phrase “mind over matter” never trained for a 10K in the middle of the summer.

With the sun’s heat coming at me from two directions, blazing down from the sky and radiating up from the road’s asphalt, I tried to put my discomfort behind me as I ran down the road on the final leg of the Beach to Beacon course, a race in which I would be competing on Aug. 2.

“This is nothing,” I said to myself at the five-mile mark, the sweat dripping down my forehead. “Just a little over a mile to go. No biggie.”

And then I saw the hill.

I had been warned by my friend Joe about the last mile of the race – three hills in a row, he’d said. At the time I hadn’t really thought anything of it – hills shmills, I’m a powerful girl – but man, do things look different on an 80-degree morning after 45 minutes of running. The slope may as well have been Mt. Katahdin.

For those who aren’t familiar with the B2B route, it runs from Crescent Beach to Portland Head Light, and is 10 kilometers (or 6.2 miles) in total. The roads racers run include Route 77 and Shore Road. It is a beautiful course – if I hadn’t been blinded by the sweat in my eyes I probably would have enjoyed it more. Sights include the well-manicured lawns of Cape Elizabeth homes and gardens. After about four miles, racers breathe in the unmistakable smell of the ocean, and eventually, run through Smugglers Cove with glimpses of the Atlantic.

Before the giant curve of the mini-mountain that makes an inexperienced racer want to crawl for the hills, the course is challenging without being overwhelming. It actually starts on a downward slope and has enough flat running to keep an even pace. Around the third mile, runners hit some small slopes that keep the course interesting, but in no way have the disheartening effect like the hill of doom.

According to the Beach to Beacon official Web site, www.beach2beacon.org, the starting altitude of the race is 50 feet above sea level and the finish altitude is only 25 feet above sea level. I knew this before I started began running the course and so I told myself that no matter what hills I encountered I would – technically – still be running in a downward direction. I like to think of it as a personal Jedi-mind trick.

Yeah. Not so much. Felt like I was running uphill pretty much the whole way. Even when I was running downhill.

However, there were some good things about my first run-through. I went with a training group from Hannaford’s Supermarkets, who are a welcoming, non-judgmental crew. (Even when I showed up five minutes after they’d started their run, they all waited for me at the finish line, cheering as I brought up the rear of the pack. That felt nice. Almost as nice as the free Gatorade and water they had at mile-intervals during the run.)

And while I don’t know exactly how long it took me to finish the run – the clock had started with the pack that was on time – I knew that I finished it. I think I did it in under an hour. Not a record breaking time, but not bad for a first-time racer.

The hills were killer, and no mind-over-matter trick could erase that fact. I guess when the actual race comes around, I’ll have to strengthen my jedi powers, but I think I’ll stop short of carrying Yoda on my back, I just don’t need the extra weight.