First hill workout for the hill phase

To get the full flavor of how the workout went for people you need to check out the posts from Wiley, Geezer and Ken. Now I could just end the post with that and say go read what they have to say but … that just wouldn’t be fun.

I’ve run most varieties of the Scenic Hill over the last two years. The long run where it’s just a blip, then the loop (Wiley has a picture of it on his post) with a consistent effort, then the loop charging the hills, and then hill repeats that are up the hill and then back down for a recovery and then … you know the rest. Looking at my log I have a few times with different flavors, July 2007 had one workout that was similar and here were the loops. The difference on this one was that I was supposed to stay consistent on the uphill and cut 10 seconds on each loop.

6:43 (2:40 up hill)
6:39 (2:35)
6:20 (2:30)
6:10 (2:25)
5:52 (2:25)

Today the goal was to charge the hills, making each one faster than the last but keeping the overall loop between half marathon pace and marathon pace. Now this is from memory not looking at my watch at the moment:

6:15 (2:22)
6:15 (2:17)
6:30 (2:12)
6:30 (2:17)

The overall loop time wasn’t really a focus but somewhere between Half Marathon mile time (6:30ish) and Marathon mile time (6:50ish) for the loop. Just like Ken I can’t stand hills, I’m getting better at them but they are always a struggle for me to push on. So overall I’m pretty happy with the times since each of the uphills was close to as fast as I’ve run the uphill in previous workouts.

As I look back at my logs I know previous workouts had the overall loop pace targetted at 1/2 marathon to 10k pace. We’re in the hill phase right now and I’m guessing that since the group is coming off close 14 weeks without pace work going nuts at those speeds would greatly increase the risk of injury so Steve is easing us into this phase. So hopefully next time I’ll be able to charge up the hill a little faster and keep the overall loop time in the same range as today, it seemed like plenty of time to recover.