Trying something new

Hill Training

Now there are two words that are going to fill me with dread over the coming weeks.  The evil guy who devised my training programme incorporates a lot of this into the schedule.  Kenyan Hills he calls them.

I thought I’d give them a go as Week 1 officially starts a week on Sunday and I like to know what I’m supposed to be doing….  Firstly I had to find a hill of 6-8% gradient – I have no idea how to measure this and as I live in an extremely hilly area, I just picked one of the less mean hills I run.

Then I had to spend 8 minutes running up and down said hill and around 80% effort (threshold pace).  Then rest for a bit.  Then do it all again. TWICE.

You may think that running down hill is easy.  It can be and I normally take it quite steady.  But this time I had to run at the same effort as running up the hill which ended up being quite fast.  It was exceptionally hard and I had to give up adapt the schedule half way through the last 8 minutes (which meant I decided to start running home which meant running up a series of hills so was in fact harder!!).

But I really enjoyed the feeling of doing something a bit different and I do like having a prescribed programme to follow so I think I’m going to enjoy doing this programme.