When people say hill training, the vast majority of us quiver. Most people hate the idea of hills. They hurt, they take longer and they ruin our average speed. But what you need to realize is how beneficial they are. For both running and biking, hills are a vital part of training. Whether or not you'll be racing courses with hills, they are a necessary evil when it comes to training.
The benefits of hill training are numerous.
My favorite is hill repeats on foot. What I like about them is that they are usually short and to the point. Find a hill of 50m or longer, warmup, run up and down it a bunch, cool down. Done. Simple enough. For me, I have a hill about a mile away, so I have a good easy warmup. Once I'm there, I'm able to put down a water bottle or excess gear as I start sweating next to a stop sign and get at it. My hill is just over 100m so it's a tough one.
What I like about training on the hill is that it puts such a hard load on my system without excessive amount of pounding. If you think about it, you're not knocking your knees around as much when running hills. You land at a higher point from where you started, giving your knees a break from the pounding on flats and downhills.
Another great way to hill train on foot is to find a route full of hills. This keeps your mind a bit more open and not so focused on a set amount of repeats, but more so how you feel. How I come at this workout is to hit the hills up hard, coast down, and try to really relax and bring down my heart rate in the flats. Even if I have to do loops around a few hills, sometimes this is better than just going to a hill and running up and down one.
The same goes for biking hills. Although, it's generally better to find a longer hill for the bike if you can. You can learn a lot about your biking skills doing hill repeats. You can try out different cadences as you put in the work, learning to either work at a higher cadence to spin yourself up or at a lower cadence that causes your larger muscles to work harder. Both are good, but have their places. Faster cadence will save your legs, but can also make staying balanced harder. Sower cadence works those bigger muscles, which is always good, but on race day, if you need to run after, it's not necessarily the best. So try out both and find what works best for you.
You can also do the same thing as running where you find a course with a few hills that are tough and loop through it. Attack the hills, recover the down and flush it out on the flats. Either way, you'll get a great workout if you're doing repeats or a hilly course. Remember it's not all about mileage when doing hill workouts. Pay more attention to time on the bike and elevation change. 50 miles on a flat course can feel much easier than 20 miles on a hilly course.
-Dave
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