Hill reps

After the suffering on the hills in the last couple of runs I thought it was best to add a hill rep session into the mix. As tempting as it is to drive over to Leichhardt I actually have a Lilyfield Rd style hill just around the corner and that makes things a little easier when trying to get through the morning and out the door with the rest of the family.

By my "expert" measurements the hill is around 300m long and pretty consistent in regards to slope, some traffic but not too much, minimal on street parking and footpaths on both sides.

My last session on the hill was at the start of September 2 days before I damaged my calf at North Head and I did 10 reps at an average of 85 sec with an average 2:40 jog back/rest. This time I decided to shorten the recovery piece down to 2:30.

The reps were
1 86
2 83
3 86
4 84
5 84
6 87
7 87
8 88

So average of 86 sec for 8 but also cut out 70 seconds recovery which seemed to make a difference. The last couple were real tough and you could really feel the lactic starting to burn. Another km or so warm down via a little loop back home.

Here's the bodylink HR data, you can see my time at the top increased as the reps went on and I tried to get my breathe back to be able to jog back down.




It also was certainly a lot warmer than when I did these last in September, even at 6:30 in the morning and it took quite a few minutes under a cool shower to reduce the copious sweat output.

Pretty happy with the session and not too far from my "peak" performance in Sept, another good benchmark for the months ahead.

I've decided to mix up 5-6 different sessions to rotate through on my "hard effort" days of Tuesday and Friday, these will be
1km intervals (treadmill) - building up to 6 of these (@3:40) and then decreasing recovery to 1 min, then increasing pace
800m intervals (track) - aiming to get to 10 @ 3:00 with same recovery (aka Yasso 800's), this is a supposed benchmark for a marathon time
400m intervals (track) - build up to 8 (@80 sec) with 90 sec recovery
30/30's aka Pat special - hey everyone else seems to be doing them...
Hills - just get up to as many as possible around 85 sec per rep up to an hour long session for some real consistency
2nd long run - 15-20km @ 5min/km over good undulating ground

So there you go, Summer Series tomorrow night at Ermington/Rydalmere, not a lot of bush to be seen, or even hills for that matter, should be a fast/longish course.

Edit... Belay that fast/longish thoughts it seems the course will be set in the area between Marsden/Victoria and Silverwater Roads, I know for a fact there are some good hills there!