Lemon Drop Hill, an infamous spot late in Grandma’s Marathon course, lives up to its lore

DULUTH – By 1985, a specific spot along the Grandma’s Marathon course, which winds from near Two Harbors, Minn., hugs the shoreline of Lake Superior and ends in Canal Park, was already getting buzz among runners.

On a route known more for its scenic vistas than incline changes, Lemon Drop Hill is a short, steep and mighty moment at about the 22-mile mark of the route. That year’s winner Don Norman, racing alongside a 1984 Olympian, made his push and never looked back.

“That’s all I needed, just to break contact” Norman told a Duluth News Tribune sportswriter at the time. “After that, I just I blew in. I was gone.”

As for Canadian Dave Edge, who finished second behind Norman, he also knew that was the spot to move. It just didn’t work out for him that day.

“It was horrible,” Edge said at the time. “My style went to pieces.”

Forty years later, Lemon Drop Hill remains a defining spot on the Grandma’s Marathon and Garry Bjorklund Half-Marathon route — even though the restaurant it’s named for, which once sat at the crest, was torn down in the late 1980s with the expansion of Interstate 35. It’s just south of Glensheen Mansion.

The 26.2- and 13.1-mile races Saturday morning are expected to draw thousands of runners and spectators to Duluth for the largest event of the year.

“Every course has to have its challenges, and that was one of our challenges of the race,” said Scott Keenan, who founded the race in 1977. “It’s a good place to make a move, if you want to.”

In his book “My Journey to Grandma’s Marathon: History & Heroes,” Keenan wrote: “Many runners would agree it’s not an ideal location for a major rise on a marathon course.”

And it had to have a name, like the Boston Marathon’s Heartbreak Hill, an incline between Miles 20-21. Lemon Drop Hill was coined by either retired Duluth News Tribune sportswriter Kevin Pates or his former colleague Mark Stodghill, both deeply steeped in running communities. Keenan credits Pates, and so does Pates, but neither minds if the other gets credit.

Grandma’s Marathon doesn’t have official stats on the grade or length of the hill. An amateur runner coming off a bad back can bury it in less than 2 minutes.

Michael Ylinen has run one marathon in his life: Grandma’s, 1983, at age 35. Through the entire race, he said, he worried about what would happen when he reached Lemon Drop Hill.

“But when I got there, I actually picked up the pace because the change in grade was very different than the previous 22 miles,” Ylinen said in an email. “My guess is I was using different muscles going up the hill, and it felt good.”

He passed multiple runners, he said, and though the rest of the race was said to be a downhill grade he found the final 4 miles to be painful. Ylinen said he planned to run a marathon every five years after that, but never did again.

Maybe Lemon Drop Hill is daunting only to people who don’t train on Duluth’s hills.

“I wouldn’t even describe it as a hill in Duluth,” said Dayeton Tolle, 28, who is running the marathon for the second time on Saturday. “I feel like Duluth has much harder hills.”

Tolle, who does hill work up to four times a week in the latter part of her Grandma’s Marathon training schedule, does concede that Lemon Drop comes along at a tricky point in the race.

“The timing can be difficult in itself,” she said.

Tolle suggests focusing on the top of the hill and beyond, and a mantra, something like “I’ve got this,” for the brief push.

Elsie Vollom, 21, said she hasn’t put too much thought into this stretch of the course. She broke her foot while running Grandma’s last year — somewhere between Miles 7 and 11 — and still finished. What’s Lemon Drop Hill, comparatively?

“I’m not too worried because of last year,” she said. “Anything will be better than that.”

Dominic Ondoro, who won Grandma’s Marathon in 2022 and will return this year, took advantage of Lemon Drop Hill in securing his victory. He’s known to favor hills and he made his move at the base of it.

“I picked out that hill,” he told a reporter covering the 2022 race for the Star Tribune. “I knew that’s where I was going to go, and I was feeling good there.”

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