Hill repeats

nerraw1111

What is the craic with these?

Is it simply a case of running up a hill repeatedly until knackered?

Or do you take a more measured approach and a start on a small number of repeats and increase it week by week?

Also, does the hill length matter? Was thinking of the Kyper road in the park or the magazine fort.

token56

I think you're talking about hill sprints? Ideally they should be fairly measured. i.e. Sprinting a certain distance up a hill and then have a measured recovery jog back down, and repeating for a certain amount of intervals. Putting numbers to these will depend on your fitness and what you are looking for I guess. For these to be effective it should also be a hill with a steep enough gradient I'd say. Different people have different opinions on what they would call a hill.

asimonov

Here's a sample hill work out that i did earlier in the year. Just keep the hill around 8% - 12% mark (not stupid steep) and keep the recovery brisk enough ie no stopping with hands on knees!

20' easy/ 10 x 1' hills @ 5 km effort (jog back down recovery- 80/90")/ 20' easy

On the first one, just pick a mark for where you reached on the hill - and then try and hit that mark each time. If you this for a couple of weeks just drop back to 75" recovery.

I don't do these at the moment (i think i did 4 - 5 of them at the start of the year) - but any week i need a light maintenance workout, maybe because its a down week or if I have a race etc i do 12 X 30" hills - which is a great workout to do.

Slogger Jogger

It all depends what you are training for. T Runner did hard repeats of a steep hill from Crone wood at high tempo effort as training for Warriors. I did 6 x 3 min uphills yesterday covering c. 80m ascent in each climb before an easy downhill and start over again in my own village forest. In my case the tempo wasn't high but the effort was kept constant. Hill repeats can be what you want them to be depending on the gradient of hill you have to hand and what level of pain you want to inflict on yourself and what your goal is.

nerraw1111

Cheers for the replies.

The aim is to get stronger on the hills and quicker and run some trails later in the year and early next year. Be a bit more competitive. I can't get out to the mountains during the week so hill repeats in the Phoenix Park is my alternative.