Uphill, It All Evens Out

I don't know if you remember my run two weeks ago when I went out with two younger gentlemen for an 'easy' 5k. Well, one of those boys (Matt) and I are trying to fit in a weekly 30-40 minute run together.

The plan for this week was to leave from my house, run down the Rodman Hall hill and hit the trails. 

Anyone living in Southern Ontario knows that it has been raining non-stop for days now so the trail idea was quickly kiboshed. No need to come home completely soaked AND covered in mud.

So, I suggested a wee bit of hill training.  Matt, being gung ho for pretty much anything, quickly agreed.  We headed out in the rain and ran down down down to the bottom of the hill.  He's never really done hill training before so I did a quick review on how to swing his arms and to keep his eyes focused on the top of the hill. I explained that we typically run up the length of two telephone poles, turn around and run back down.  Then we run up three telephone poles, and back down.  This cycle continues until we get to the top which is eleven telephone poles away. 

Sounds easy non?

Absofrak'inlutely not!

But it is so rewarding when you're done.  We felt ambitious so we started out with three telephone poles and ran that hill 8 times, clocking 4.6k in total (uphill and downhill).  Pretty much the same distance as our regular 5k runs but a completely different workout. We felt exhausted and pumped at the same time and headed home looking like someone threw buckets of water on us. Man it was raining!  

The best part for me?  I struggle to keep up with Matt on flat ground.  Add a bit of an incline and suddenly things were a little more evenly balanced.  The longer the hill, the farther I inched ahead.  Nice!

Here's hoping it rains a lot this summer :)

For those of you interested in the little details - I decided to try my heart rate monitor during the run.  I rarely wear it and am trying to get a sense of my heart rate, target zones, max rate etc.  My sitting down on my ass heart rate is about 55 bpm.  Yesterday night, my average during the run was 156 and the peak (nearing the top of the last hill climb) was 177.  Not sure yet if that means I was seconds away from death or if I'm an athlete of olympic quality but those were the numbers.