The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Moaning

The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Moaning

Seymour, our trusty and fearless leader couldn't make Hill Training last night so he left the training session in my dubious hands...

As you can see from my Polar S625X, we did eight hills and lovely hills they were. This has been a heavy workload week for me (over 100K - 65 miles), and I must confess, I am surprised that my level of recovery has been as good as it has been. But I died on the last two hills. I had nothing left but lactic acid and the desire to throw up. I even thought I coughed up a piece of lung or two... Gasp, Gasp, GASP!

I have suffered very little chronic lower back, leg or neck pain at all through all of this. I have had what would have to be considered an acceptable degree of muscle stiffness, almost all quads, and that would be primarily I think from all the downhill breaking I had to do during the 64 kilometres of the Stormy.

My Tempo Run on Tuesday left me shaking my head. I had NO loss of leg speed. Thank you to Hugh for making me run a sensible pace to prevent an overtraining mishap. I simply can not imagine a serious endurance athlete training without a heart rate monitor. Hugh has a 610 and wants to upgrade to the S625x, Justin just got one - the S625X that is - for his birthday and I KNOW Patrick is doing everything in his power to get one. Right now he's using an older S210, and has been fascinated with someof the information he's been gathering. Kevin is a 625 man himself and we are having a great time comparing notes.

If you look at my Hill chart you can see I was successful in getting a minimum 40 beat swing on the hills, recovering to around 130 and then pushing myself up over 170. My current level of conditioning is making it exceedingly hard for me to rev up my heart rate like I used to be able to a few years ago. To get over 90% of my maximum heart rate and especially to get close to 95% requires an enormous effort on my part, usually at the end of an 8K or 10K race where I am going full out over the last 500 metres.

Everyone in the clinic has improved by leaps and bounds. Heard a few moans and groans about the length of the warm-up and cool-down runs, but there are no short cuts to excellence and I want to do everything in my power to prevent any injuries on my watch. After a hard, hard workout, it can be tempting to ease off, and the next thing you know, your legs have stiffened up and you end up with cramps or worse yet, a muscle strain or pull.

Unfortunately we were joined by a bit of a class clown last night, who thought it was funny to skip out on the cool-down portion of the hill training workout and take a short cut back to the Running Room. Fine for him, everybody has free will. But he took a bunch of people with him and the end result was of course that their work out was compromised by the actions of someone who wasn't thinking with a full deck of cards...

What seemed like a lark last night won't seem quite so funny at the 32K point in the marathon this October, when they are all beginning to wonder why their speed has abandoned them, their legs are cramping up, muscle spasms have set in, and they can't seem to keep their shoulders from slumping over... And then it will hit them. They still have 10K and an hour to go to cross the finish line.

Maybe they'll take the next Hill workout a little more seriously...