Hills, or "Inclines"

Since it is Hill Month 2 for our advanced team I guess it was no surprise that last night we had a hill workoutBut instead of doing tons of repeats on steep hills, we did 2 repeats on a bunch of rolling hills.

In fact, Ramon didn't even consider them hills, but "inclines".

What is the difference?

Well, on hills you have to shorten your stride in order to make up for the steepness of the hill. Otherwise you would die. On inclines your stride really shouldn't change at all. And because of this, we were supposed to be running at 90% effort level, which is about a 5K pace. Whew! This was a tall order, especially since our workout last night consisted of 8 miles of these rolling hills. (Of course we did have some recovery time in between, so it was sort of more of an interval workout with lots of hills thrown in).The tricky thing about effort levels is that you have to maintain the same effort for the entire workout. So, you may actually be going slower up the hill, medium on the flat part and faster on the down part, but the effort is all the same. An easy way to measure this is your breathing. When you're doing a workout at 90% you should basically be huffing and puffing. This is EXACTLY what I was doing the entire workout (well, the non recovery parts).

During these workouts I try not to use my watch, because Ramon told us the point of the workout was not to save energy for the end, but to go all out on each one. Therefore, your second round would be slower. Besides, effort levels are not about time. This kind of workout reminds me of the Karate Kid, because you are really really in tune with your body. I'm hoping that this means that I will become a better runner. I KNOW I never paid attention to my body this much before while I was running.

The workout was insanely hard and I really pushed myself. I was even keeping up with some of the insane NYRR classes that were being held in the park at the same time. I was so tired and my legs were extremely tired at the end, but I felt great!

The rest of the week for me is a taper because I am running in the Queens Half Marathon for time. The coaches all say it is a good idea to run a half around this time in the training to give yourself a good idea of what time to expect on your marathon, and just to see how you're going to race in a long distance.

I am excited but also nervous.