My training plan suggests that after a few stride workout, start doing them on a course with rolling hills - so some are up, some down, and some flat. I have no choice!

I know your hills are worse than here but that's how mine are. Rolling here and there and I have to time them unless I want to run the same hill up and down!

 

Let's just say that back in my stroller running days, I did not take the stroller on this route 

lol

 

At that point even just going at the same pace up a hill as flat running counts as strides, for me at least, lol. Or do you/will you actually speed up the hills?

I certainly run them harder, IDK about faster. I assume the goal is the same kind of hard effort whether up/down/flat, you will just have a different pace. And I don’t look at my pace during strides anyway. 

One irritation of last week’s hill workout is I like the fast average pace that comes out of normal speedwork sessions. For this one it was slower than usual. Because the hard uphills and the easy downhills both ended up at the slow end of easy/recovery pace.

 

Indeed. One of the things I liked when I trained with Hudson Elite was the assigned paces for hill workouts. So running hill repeats at 10k pace for 2 minutes would entail finding a hill that you could do that on. The first hill I tried it on, they came out to recovery pace, slower than easy. lmao

This is silly. Hill workouts should be effort not paces. Not all hills are even close to being the same. 10k pace for me on the hill by my house would be close to stride effort!

When my friend/Coach used to give me workouts, it was a bit different because sometimes she would give me paces for a specific location to do the workout...because she lives here too and runs the same hills.

 

Indeed. One of the things I liked when I trained with Hudson Elite was the assigned paces for hill workouts. So running hill repeats at 10k pace for 2 minutes would entail finding a hill that you could do that on. The first hill I tried it on, they came out to recovery pace, slower than easy. lmao

Sounds like too much work. What McMillan is actually recommending in my case is a “hill circuit”—Run hard up the hill (6-10% grade) for 60 seconds, jog for 30-45 seconds, then run a stride on a flat section lasting 20 to 30 seconds, then jog back down to the bottom of the hill to begin the circuit again. So you have to find a hill the exact length and grade for the hill repeats, but also has a flat section after the top. OK then. I just blew off the part that wasn’t up & down the hill.

 

Couldn't you just jog & do strides in little circles on the top of the hill?

LOL except actually I was just using the bottom 0.1 miles of a 0.4 mile hill, so I never made it to the top.

 

Didn't you run a marathon last week?

I RAN a marathon; I didn’t race it. Only ran it because it was already paid for 🤦🏻‍♀️ (Deferred from last year)

 

5 miles done while the payroll calculates.  15.4 for the day.  Not bad for a Monday.

 

Eta:

 

Also, this, although I have never actually logged 300 in a calendar month:

 

Last 30 days:	303.2 mi