Hill Repeats

I think I'm having a love-hate relationship with hill repeats right now.  Tonight was my last Thursday night in the gym. My new run clinic starts next Thursday, so as per the schedule I've been following tonight was hill repeats. I seem to do ok for the first couple and then the last few just about kill me. 😃

I started out with a brisk walk for 5 minutes to warm up then kicked the speed up to 3.5mph. I did the gradual increase in incline like I did a few weeks ago. I like it better than the hill program in the machine. I can put the incline up and down as I choose so it's easier to get the proper rest segments.  I ran each incline for 2 minutes and walked for one and repeated 12 times and finished off with 5 minutes of walking brisk. 

I missed getting a picture of the machine during cool down as someone I hadn't seen in years came over to talk to me as I was cooling down.  It was as I was going downstairs that I realized I didn't get the picture. Thank goodness I looked at my distance when I started my cool down.

Tomorrow is a rest day and then I have weigh in on Saturday and a 9K run on the schedule. 

I'm a little nervous about weigh in on Saturday after my gain last week but I'm hoping for the best. I've been on plan and gotten in a lot of activity. 

Staying on Plan and Hill Repeats

Staying on plan.
I took the day off work on Thursday as my wonderful husband gave me tickets to see Bryan Adams in concert for my birthday back in December.  Wednesday's concert didn't start until 8pm and considering the length of a concert, traffic and the hour plus drive home, we decided to treat ourselves to a day off so we wouldn't have to go to work on very little sleep.  Turns out that was an excellent plan.  I drove into work with my friend I carpool with and after work, I drove downtown to her office so I could give her car to her.

After I dropped off the car, I figured I had a good hour or so to wait until my husband would arrive for us to go for dinner before the concert.  In the past I probably would have set myself up in a coffee shop, reading a book and drinking tea.  However, it was a dry day, a little brisk but the sun was out so I decided to go walk the Seawall.  I figured since we were eating out and the restaurant my husband chose doesn't really have a lot of "plan" friendly meals, I knew that I was going to be using a lot of points for dinner no matter what I ordered, so I decided to earn some activity points.

Beautiful view of the North Shore Mountains on my walk

I had a nice brisk walk fr 45 minutes when I got a text from my wonderful husband that he had just pulled off the freeway and would be at our meeting spot shortly.  I turned around and headed for where we were going to go for dinner to meet up with him.  I went through the menu earlier and decided on the Chicken Sandwich with Side Salad, pretty on plan but still 22 points!

After dinner, we still had almost an hour before the doors would open for the concert so we decided to go for a moonlit walk along the seawall.  It was pitch black but there is nice lighting around the area where we were walking.  I took a picture of my husband but the one he took of me didn't turn out.  I love this picture of him with the North Shore mountains lit up behind him.

Lights of the North Shore in the Background

After our walk we headed back to the car and drove to Roger's Arena to await Bryan Adams. The concert was phenomenal.  I love seeing Bryan Adams in concert.  He's old school in that there's no flash or glitz, it's the man and his band or the man and his guitar and he sings his heart out for a couple of hours. 

So it must be Thursday as I had hill repeats on the schedule again.  After I posted about doing hill repeats last week I received an email from an advanced runner who told me what I actually did was a Pyramid run.  So I decided to try to do hill repeats again, but instead of figuring it out myself I used the Hill program on the actual treadmill.  My only mistake was waiting until after dinner to go to the gym.   We had dinner early as I took the day off.  We ate around 5pm and I headed to the gym around 7 but halfway through my hill run I felt like I was going to throw up.  I persevered though and survived.  I set the treadmill for the hill program level 5 with a speed of 3.2mph, set my garmin for 2:1's (2 minutes running, 1 minute walking) and set off.  To my great relief I made it!  I did my hill repeats without having to split the 2 minutes of running up!  A big improvement over last week!

Hill Repeats completed!

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.