Sunrise 5:51 am: Getting a physics lesson

This morning the Dawn Joggers did 'reverse Dish,' running up the hill from the Junipero Serra entrance near Campus Drive East rather than their usual start from Alpine Road. They'd taken this route a number of times on Friday mornings during the winter months when it was too dark to tackle Arastradero, but this was the first time they'd done it in a long time with the sun fully up and its heat in effect. When they got to the top, the female DJ mentioned that it seemed to her that this approach was a more difficult climb, implying a better workout and more energy (= calories) expended. There ensued a physics lesson from the male DJ: as the altitude achieved was exactly the same, so was the energy expended, even though the climb was steeper and the workout more intense. Newtonian physics dictates it's always the same amount of energy to lift a body to equal height. Her thinking corrected, the female DJ was comforted somewhat by the fact that the Junipero Serra approach is two-tenths of a mile longer (oh, the virtues of Gmaps Pedomter!).