Learning to Love Hills
I used to hate running hills. In fact, I despised hills. I started running almost 30 years ago in Chicago, an extremely flat city in which the main hills are overpasses. When I moved to the Washington, DC, area in 1985, I ran exclusively on the Mall, even shunning the opportunity to run up Capitol Hill. When I ran the 1986 Rockville Twilight 8K I thought I was going to die. That feeling was magnified in my first marathon in 1987 when I crawled up the hill at the Iwo Jima memorial at the finish of the Marine Corp Marathon.
Upon joining MCRRC, I found that I could not avoid hills if I wanted to participate in club races—since except for track meets and races on the C&O Canal, every club race involved hills. At first I did not enjoy these races because I did not know how to run hills. I had the notion that I should run every mile at the same pace but usually found myself running out of gas before the end. It was not until I started training with a heart monitor that I understood what was happening to my body.
Once I strapped on a heart monitor, I soon began to conquer hills instead of letting the hills conquer me.
Simply stated, your heart rate shoots up substantially when you run up a hill. It isn't long before you exceed your anaerobic threshold (roughly 85 percent of maximum heart rate) and when that happens you start breathing very deeply and your legs become heavy. The only way to recover, unfortunately, is to slow down and wait for your heart rate to drop so that you can continue at your previous effort. The problem is that when your heart rate gets really high, it takes a long time for it to drop.
How many times has this happened to you? You zoom up a hill passing some runners but within two or three minutes of passing the crest of the hill, the same runners are passing you. It used to happen to me before I started training with a heart monitor and employing the principles of effort-based training. As described above, I would become so anaerobic that the only way for me to recover was to slow down.
Once I strapped on a heart monitor, I soon began to conquer hills instead of letting the hills conquer me. I learned how to run hills at an 85 percent effort by listening to my monitor. This training taught me how to perceive a certain level of exertion that I was able to translate into successful racing. The truth of the matter is that you are more efficient as a runner by maintaining a certain level of effort over a period of time than you are when your level of effort is bouncing up and down.
I found my times dropping in races once I focused on level of effort, and as a result was quite successful in races such as the now-defunct Bethesda Chase, the Howard County 10 Miler (the RRCA Challenge race) and the Pittsburgh Marathon. I no longer worry about mile splits in a race because I know that my uphill miles will be slower than downhill or relatively flat miles. Instead, by concentrating on a constant effort I will run the fastest race possible. I no longer concern myself about runners next to me as we go up a hill. I know with absolute certainty that I will be catching them once we hit the top of the hill because they will be forced to slow down to recover while I can maintain the same level of effort—which means I will be speeding up.
The other good news about learning to run hills by effort is that you can translate this feeling to relatively flat courses such as Pike's Peek and Cherry Blossom and run faster race times. If you don't believe me, try training on hills with a heart monitor and see the results. You may be surprised.
Coach West is a licensed coach, affiliated with MCRRC, and available to coach motivated adult runners. A portion of his coaching fees for MCRRC members is returned to MCRRC. For further information about personal coaching opportunities, contact Coach West at kirtwest@comcast.net.
