Hill Repeats

I had a good day at work today...no temptations!  Yeah!  I headed to gym right after dropping my friend off after work.  I had hill repeats on the schedule for today and after doing some "Google" searches on doing hill repeats on a treadmill, I had my game plan in place.

I warmed up by walking for 5 minutes at incline of 1% (I've been told that the 1% incline better simulates running outdoors).  When I finished the warm up, I increased my speed to 3.2mph (please remember I'm the turtle) and raised the incline to 4%.  I planned to run for 2 minutes on the inclines, go back down to the 1% and lower my speed to 2.8 mph for the walking recovery between each incline. 

In total I did 12 incline intervals.  4%, 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, 8%, 7.5%, 6.5%. 5.5% 4.5% 4% and finished with 4%  I had planned to run for 2 minutes at each interval at my 3.2mph pace, however the steeper the incline the harder it was and I ended up making some compromises.  I wanted to keep my speed the same, so I broke up the running for 2 minutes into smaller chunks when I was at the 7, 7.5 and 8% inclines.  I ran for 30 seconds, stood on the side bars for 20 seconds, jumped back on for 20 seconds, off for 10 seconds, on for 30 seconds, off for a minute and then changed the incline.  I just wasn't capable of doing the full two minutes consistently during the higher inclines.

Hill repeats done for this week.

The workout was stinkin' hard, but I was very proud of completing it even though I had to make adjustments along the way.

Happy to be finished!

I know that with practice it will come and I'm going to be doing this work out on Thursdays for the next few weeks until my run clinic starts so I'm hoping that by the end of the month I can increase my running time at the higher inclines to the full two minutes, but that I can also increase to 9, 10, 11 and 12% inclines.