Week One/Hills

I start Week 1 of training tomorrow. Here is how my week looks:

Monday: 3 miles
Tuesday: 5 miles
Wednesday: 3 x hill (total of 3 miles)
Friday: 5 miles pace
Saturday: 10 miles

This is obviously an easy week for me (minus the hills). I have been running higher weekly mileage, so last training cycle, I bumped up the first few weeks to make it more difficult. Since that resulted in an injury, I am going to follow the plan. Training won't get hard until January, but that is okay. I'll run some easy miles and take it easy for a few weeks. There will be plenty of hard weeks to come!

It is very important that I train hills for Boston and this presents a problem since it is winter. Last cycle, I used Pringle hill as my "hill." This is the steepest hill I could find relatively close to my house. Plus, it is exactly 400 meters which is ideal for a hill workout. I had an ideal situation in the summer. I would drive to my parents house, and jog to the hill. My grandmother lives at the top of it, so she would often come out and watch me run up the hill (of course, telling me how crazy I was!). It helped knowing someone was watching me, since, damn, that hill was STEEP! It took every ounce of will power to keep running up that darn thing. I wanted to look good with her watching! Plus, sometimes her neighbor would come out and watch too! Corny as it was, it was nice to have a cheering section for this difficult workout. When I would finish, she would give me a drink and I would jog to my parents' house and spend the day at the pool!

Well, now that it is winter, I am not so lucky! By the time I get home from work, change, get to my parents' house, and jog to the hill, it is dark out. I am not running up that hill in the dark. The incline is steep and the sidewalks are crappy, so I need to run on the road and cars just would not see me. So that option is out. There really are no quality hills within close running distance of my house (since the workout is hills, not mileage, i don't want to run 3 miles to get to one), so I think my best bet is on the treadmill. I plan on cranking the incline up to 8 and running at 7.3-7.5 for 2-3 minutes and repeating. That will be a hard workout! I am missing the downhill aspect, which I haven't quite figured out what I am going to do about that yet. It is important that I get my quads used to the pounding of downhill running, since Boston has a lot of downhills. I am hoping that towards the end of the cycle, I can outside for this workout. We'll see...for now, this will work!