Just Get Over it!
This post is about hills, specifically running them. (like a joke but not as funny as my wife would say)
So, After my full distance race at B2B in the fall of '14 I took off for a month and then ran a PR 10K on thanksgiving day and came up lame with a right hamstring injury after the race. The OS and spring season found me going slow and trying to get over the hamstring and This OS I have done pretty well on the Run Durability program and my mileage is up closer to where it needs to be and no recurrent hamstring issues ...Yet.
The thing is that I moved after my race in '14 to Winston-Salem NC which has hills. As I started the slow hamstring rehab / return to run fitness, I quit doing fast intervals on the flat (how I hurt my hamstring to begin with) and just began to run hills. Which is to say that my usual 5k loop near the house has about 450 feet of climb and about twice that in overall altitude change. I find that I get my HR into the higher zones very reliably but my pace only gets in the higher zones on the downhills. If I need longer distance, I just do the loop several times.
My question is : isn't this comparable to doing fast intervals on the flat like I used to do? I find that I like the hills because you can get your HR up as high as you want just by going harder uphill and since the new guidance says we should follow our HR on race day, it seems like getting my HR up is appropriate. Hills also help me keep my stride short and stay on my forefoot. I would appreciate any thoughts from more experienced members of the team.
R2
Comments
I live in the midst of hills, so I've gotten quite used to running and training in them. Here's my take on your question, which as I understand it is, "Is getting my HR up while ascending, and my speed up while descending giving me the same training benefit as doing fast intervals on the flats?" I'd say that depends on what your training goals are. If you are aiming for an IM run, then just slogging out those miles as you describe will probably give you what you need. But if your goal is to train as much speed into yourself as possible for 5K, 10K, and even 21K runs, including at the end of a triathlon, then doing intervals on a track is the gold standard.
My thinking is, there is more to fitness than simply getting your HR up (cardiovascular adaptation). There are neuro-muscular and bio-mechanical adaptations as well. Going up hill, strides are much shorter at the same effort level as they would be on the flat. And the vectors of force are different. I suspect the brain can tell the difference, and would not be as adapted to the length and direction of hop required in each stride for really fast running. So different stresses, different training adaptation. Then there's the downhill issue - trying to go really fast downhill increases the forces on your body with each step, increasing the risk of injury.
Running fast on a forgiving flat surface like a rubberized or cinder track helps reduce the risk of injury, while allowing your body to adopt the proper range of motion, cadence, and effort level required to go as fast as possible for the interval time. I live at the bottom of a hill, with three roads out/up. One leads in 3/4 of a mile/200' to a middle school cinder track. That's where I do my speed work, or else I drive to the rubberized high school track a few miles away.
After IMMT I started adding alot of hills on my training and now I see my speed on flat so much faster. Before doing alot of intervals on climbs I was about 5m/k and now my "normal" pace is about 4:40/k. I live near a bridge that cross the river which back and forth gives me 10K with about 850 feet elevation. Sadly its now close for the winter but my goal is trying to hit that bridge at least 3 mornings/week.
I love the results im seeing.
@Al, I really am not just slogging out the miles when I do the hills, I push pretty hard but how hard is difficult to assess except by average HR or average pace. My average pace is right in my Z1 1/2 range as specified by the run durability plan and my average HR is mostly in Z2-3 and higher. Interestingly, I ran a HM in Dec and had a PR by about 10 min and I even split it and was passing folks on the hills towards the finish which is encouraging. I also have a track nearby so I will probably go and do some hard intervals on the specified days.
Track and/or Treadmill for speed focus, short zn5 sprints or TP mile intervals.
These tactics have made me a better runner over the last 2 years. Al's tips and experiences with what appears to be similar terrain was invaluable. I tend to get injured when I try to do mile intervals or micromanaging paces on all the rolling hills around here. Shelfing the obsession with the paces was a big ego check but it has seemed to help me stay healthy and build some run durability. I'm still getting interval work in but I try to use the nearby high school track or the treadmill at the gym 2x week. And, if circumstances prevent me from being near the track or the treadmill on a day when I was intending to do pace work, I audible and do a bit of controlled hilly miles with a couple of strides at the end.
Seems to be working. Wish I had listened to these people years earlier. Progress, though. Good luck!