Friday Ramble 02/18/22

This week: The wonderful agony and horrible joy of running hill sprints. Cool down? Don’t mind if I do. Plus a scheduling update for next week. 

Here’s a sadistically fun thing you can do to rev your aerobic engine during a long run while building strength, speed, and toughness: hill sprints. Sometimes referred to as hill strides, this badass workout will kickstart your heart and test your mettle like few others. 

The parameters are simple. After allowing for a full warmup, run every hill you see at a (comfortably hard) tempo effort, without maxing out. If you’re dialed in on your heart rate zones, back off when you approach anaerobic effort. Otherwise, commit to cranking up every hill you encounter on your run. 

Unlike hill repeats, where you do run up hills at max effort for a set number of repetitions while walking or jogging back the hill down for recovery, hill sprints offer an ever-changing range of effort levels. When you’re not blasting uphill, settle back into an easy sustained pace that will carry you through the rest of the run. 

Running up hills like that is a challenge. Transitioning between hard and easy efforts is a challenge. Keeping your mind together while you do both is a serious challenge that will push you to your limits in a way that feels just as rewarding as it does exhausting.