Running for the Hills

I can admit it, most of my runs have pretty well all been the same. Get out there, put the distance in, maybe there are some hills along the route or maybe not, and every run is close to the same pace. Last year I was running hill repeats pretty consistently in preparation for the Nike Women's Half in San Francisco, but since then I've stopped running them. It is time to shake things up a bit. On the training plan for yesterday were hill repeats. Here was the deal:

• Warm up with 15 minutes of easy running to the hill.
• Between 15 and 20 minutes run 10 second accelerations up the hill, then 50 seconds of easy running.
• 4 x 2:00 hill climbs, recovery is the run back down to the bottom.
• Cool down for 10 minutes.

As it was pretty warm when I got home (at least for around here) I waited before going out for the run. I had a Banana Manna Fruit and Nut Bar (I got a whole slew of these for free at the Quebec marathon expo), hung out with my dog, and caught a few minutes of ANTM (I got suckered in by it being the makeover episode). By 7:00 I figured I was good to head out. I live in a pretty hilly neighborhood, but I picked the biggest hill I knew of, which was quite luckily a 15 minute run away. As I didn't want to be staring at my Garmin the entire time I created a workout in the Garmin Training Center and uploaded it. (I tried to create it in Sport Tracks, which is a way nicer piece of software, but I couldn't quite figure out how to upload it to the device. I could only export the workout to somewhere on my computer. If you use Sport Tracks and know how to do this, please let me know!) The workout program worked well as I liked it beeping at me to let me know my repeat up the hill was done. I'm pretty sure I started too fast on the first repeat, then each repeat was successively slower by just a bit. It was a good run though. I didn't get home until 8:00 and I didn't want to put dinner off too much longer so I skipped out on my strength workout. I'll try to fit it in another day this week though...

Next week I've got 5 hill climbs on the schedule, so that should be fun!