Hill repeats

One important component of our training is doing hill repeats. Hill repeats are repetitive runs up a hill. They are considered a strengthening workout. They help to improve a runners leg strength. This is a concentrated effort to run the hills multiple times to build leg strength. This was the first time I was going to for the hill repeats training. Little did I know how challenging they would be.

After doing a short warm-up run, we did some dynamic stretching which included walking lunges, the famous frankenstein walk, knee raises and some others for which I do not remember names. The dynamic warm-up was pretty intense and we could really feel our heart rate up. A short walk to the slight incline road and we began our hill repeats. What we had to do was run up the hill with strong strides and then jog/walk down and repeat that 4-6 times. The first run up itself left me huffing and puffing. The repeats were killers. I felt the long runs pale in comparison to the hill repeats. The coach paid attention to our form while doing these repeats and gave a lot of good inputs.

So hill repeats are now an integral part of weekday training. We have to do them once a week and slowly and gradually increase the number of repeats we do each time!