The primary reason for doing the hill workout is to train my body to walk up hill for extended periods of time. Why would I want to do that? A key strategy for the ultramarathon is walking up hills and running the flats and down hills. So I need to train my body to become more efficient at waking up hills.
My approach is pretty simple. I start out walking at about a 20 mpm pace. During my warm-up I increase the incline by two levels, every minutes. My treadmill has 12 levels, so at six minutes into my workout the incline is at maximum height.
Next I start increasing my mpm by one mpm every minute until my heart rate breaks 170 bpm. I keep my heart rate between 170 and 180 bps for the balance of the workout, one hour in total. Then I cool down.
My theory is that as my fitness improves, I will be able to increase my pace at the same maximum incline. Today my maximum pace was about 16 mpm. I'd like to eventually increase this to 12 mpm.
For now I will just focus on instilling the habit and discipline to repeat this workout once per week.
What do you do for your hill work?
for hills, go run cedar hill state park..
ReplyDeleteI'm luck as i have lots of hills of varying lenght and gradient to choose from all within a short distance from my town. I try to do a fair bit of my hill work on a rolling hill loop not far from home but i try to run/jog all the hills to give me leg strength. sometimes the pace is not much faster than my fast walking pace but its pushing off each foot with high knee lift as i climb which really strenghtens the calf's and quads. I save my walking inclines at pace strategy for my long runs once a week. Now i'm back on the trail's and forest roads i hope to be doing a lot more hill work :0)
ReplyDeleteI live in Colorado so hills are not really an issue for me. I have a nice little hill right outside my house that I do my hill workouts on. It kicks my behind!
ReplyDeleteWe've got lots of hills here. So, I run them when I'm training. But the really steep ones, when I'm racing, I hike them. The big key for me in hiking those tough hills is to keep the arms pumping. My rule is no hands on the hips. Good luck! Hills never get easy for me, but I do get up them a tad quicker and without crying (kiddin' about the crying)
ReplyDeleteI've been using stairs as a replacement for hill repeats. I've read that alot of ultra runners use the stair master at the gym to simulate hill training this way. I usually try to run upstairs for 5 minutes for each repeat then jog down. By my 5th repeat my quads are toast! I start and end with an easy 3km.
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