My Love-Hate Relationship with Hill Repeats

Summer vacation for the kids means mommy gets to spend a lot of time running the fire road behind my house, instead of my usual long runs through the beautiful city of Thousand Oaks. When my children were little, I would take them to the kids club at Spectrum and run on the treadmill for an hour or so utilizing the incline function. Now…they would rather kiss me in public than be seen at the kids club.

Which takes us back to that fire road…

My summers equal hill repeats, and lots of them!

Now I love hill repeats for two reasons. First, running up hills is really speed work in disguise. Running hill repeats on a regular basis will make you a faster runner and will increase your VO2 max. Active.com has a fantastic article on maximizing your VO2 training. Second, I really love recovering on the downhill run. The downhill recovery makes it possible for me to repeat the inclines over and over. 

You will also notice how much easier running on fairly flat surfaces becomes.

Now enter the hate side….

It is hard work, especially after the 10th interval. This is where your mental toughness is tested. I try to overcome with mental games such as hill markers. I  run up 5 times to a certain marker (happens to be an irrigation marker), followed by another 5 to another marker. Breaking up the intervals seems to help me stay strong and finish.