Hilly McHillyface

Unless you're a sadist and not a runner, I'd say that the very notion of a hill on your running route sends a shiver down your spine.

What may seem like a small mound to most people, is an incline steeper than a very steep thing and more formidable than Donald Trump's imaginary Mexican wall.
And when you're a runner in your stride and you start the laborious task of making your way to the top, the hill starts growing, the end that looked oh so near gets further and further away by the step!

How do we conquer this?! Say the voices in my head. There's only one thing for it...HILL REPEATS

I'd always avoided hills, or at least made sure they had a minimal incline, until last year when I started at Panshanger Parkrun. It's a trail course with a fair few varied hill types making it one of the reasons I'm sure I cut my 5k to under 30 minutes for the first time.

But that's not hill repeats! I hear myself cry. Bear with me, I'm purely highlighting how I've come to realise that hills make you/me/us a stronger runner!

Okay, so, hill repeats - sprint up a hill for x amount of time/distance, x amount of times with a recovery period at the end of each sprint.
For example, my set today was as follows:

• 10 minute warm up jog (very easy)
• 8x (80-90% effort) sprint up 5-6% incline for 40 metres
• 1 minute recovery after each sprint (walking back down the hill)
• Slow jog back to the start for cool down with a bit of stretching

Once a week should be fine, mix up the number of sprints you do, the distance and for the recovery, I'd up it to 2-3 minutes - I'm not sure 1 minute was enough today!

Personally, I'm going to up the distance to 60 metres next week with 2 minutes recovery, and try to be more consistent with the speed and effort on each rep.

Look at me sounding like an expert, lols. Give it a try and I'd be interested if you have any other tips? I use Kinetic Revolution for my resources and I think that you should also!