Saturday, October 15, 2011

Hills Are My Friend

I had a funny turn this week and decided I should do a few hill sessions. I don't normally train much on the hills but the reality is that hills makes you stronger and all that and looking back on this year, my lack of strength has cost me a few races. So here goes with my "making it up as you go along" style of training...

Again I was staying local. I warmed up by running down to the bottom of the Rock Road (3.4km) and this is where I ran the session. Anyone who has run the Claregalway 5km/10km will be familiar with the hill on the Rock Road. The guts of the hill is between 450m and 500m and I decided to run 30 minutes continuous with effort going up the hill and float back down. I stopped on 30 minutes which had me running 8 ups and 7 downs (7km approx). I then ran back home as a warm-down (3km). All up 13.4km for the day.

I took my splits for the hill each lap. Times were:

1:50/1:49/1:50/1:47/1:47/1:45/1:44/1:42 (total 29:51 including downs)

Hopefully a few more sessions like this will put me in good stead for the Norwich Half which has its fair share of drags. Not an easy session by any stretch of the imagination and had me working up a good sweat. I suspect muscles will be sore tomorrow for my long run.

1 comment:

Ronoc said...

a convert to the hills now Matt, what doesn't destroy you makes you stronger!! I hate those sessions. Ronoc