I'm kind of new to running. I've never done even one single organized race in my life, but for some reason I have this inner desire to run a marathon. After that, possibly more, possibly get competitive with it. But for now, my goals are to just train for one and do it.

I'm moving to Taiwan next month permenantly. I also know of a marathon every november there, in a place called Hua Lien. It is in the most mountanous part of Taiwan. Basically, the word is, it's a killer marathon. Up and down hills basically the entire time.

My question is, will this effect my time that I run in? I figure of course going up hill will be slower, but does it balance out with all the down hills? Possibly going downhill is even more energy consuming, I really don't know. Is it going to be about the same for me to run this particular marathon, or am I setting myself up for disappointment in my first one?

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

I've only run 2 marathons, but this is my experience. My first was the LA marathon, quite flat. I enjoyed training, and was very proud of completing the course, as you will be, no matter how fast you go. My second marathon was in San Francisco, on July 31, 2005. I was concerned about sigining up for it because of the hilly course. I just moved all my taining into the hills around my home in Los Angeles. I checked the elevation changes over certain distances (e.g. 100 foot rise over .3 miles) and made sure I was running sufficiently steep hills in my training. That made me stronger and ensured I would finish. The hills do not balance out, though. At a certain grade, all you do is lose time because the uphill slows you down, and the downhill is too steep to really run. You'll tend to land heavy on your heels in kind of a "braking" stride. Some hills are great, though. If they're not too steep, and you've trained in hills, the uphill won't slow you down, but you'll get a nice "pull" on the downhill stretches. In the end, I'd say if its your first time out, just train in some hills so that you can finish the run, but don't worry about how fast you go. You'll be proud to finish, and your friends and family will be quite impressed. Happy running.

As Matt said, hills do make a difference. You can never re-coop enough energy on the downs to make up for the ups. It's one of the 25 "golden rules" of running (Runner's World had an article on them). You can optimize your performance on a particular hilly course, however, by running it several times, or at least running pieces of it in training. Moderate hills are certainly preferable to all flat because you avoid the monotony of the using the exact same muscle groups the whole time. You do have to understand well on a hilly course to slow down going up, otherwise you'll effectively be doing sprints in the race and you can never recover a chunk of the energy that you lose if you run your heart rate up too high in a race.