I'm all for modesty, when used sparingly lol.  As for the hill, It just needs to be taller than you are   Seriously though, a moderate hill is good...doesn't need to be a mountain, just something that you encounter on your regular runs and say, "hey, this is a hill."  I don't know if hills are better than stairs, but since we're runners and not stair racers, I feel like it's better to do something that's more like running.

There are three types of basic hill workouts.

1.  Hill sprints.  Find a steep hill.  Like 10% steep if you can find it.  A bridge will do.  Sprint up hard for 6-8 seconds.  As in all out hard.  Walk back down.  Do it again.  Start small with 2-3 reps.  I started big two years ago, hurt my left hamstring, and it has never healed.  Work your way up to 10 reps.

2.  Hill repeats.  Find a hill with a moderate slope of 3-5%.  Mark out something like 300-400 yards.  Run up at 5K effort, not pace, and then jog back down for recovery.  However, there is as much downhill racing as uphill racing so train on the downhills as well.  If you are doing a total of 10 hard efforts, do 7 hard uphill and 3 hard downhill or 6 and 4.

3.  Long hills.  These are just runs on long hills.  Good stuff.  A variation of this is to find a route with rolling terrain and do a fartlek workout where you run uphill moderately hard (not 5K effort hard, more like HM effort hard) and recovery on the downhills for a while and then run some downhills hard while recovering on the uphill.

Do those hill workout include crushing tortoises you bastard?

 

 

www.runningahead.com/groups/BF_and_Beyond/forum/2b885da15ef748b2adff34e446faf5ea/

hehehe

Lol, I will take ya'lls word for it.  But I will do the squats and bridge thingy every now and then just because I enjoy it. I don't know if I could get used to feeling beat up, it is just awful when you have a baby lol.

I felt more beat up during runs when I did squats, but I didn't try them for more than a few months, and hated them in high school. Glad your running is getting better.