Friday, June 4, 2010

Return to the Hill Of Death

Oh great and mighty Hill Of Death! I have missed you! It brings me such joy to run (if you can call that "running") up your steep slopes. It brings me even greater joy to run back down your steep slopes, but that's beside the point...

As you may have guessed, after several weeks without going near the Hill Of Death, we finally returned to it last night. It was a bittersweet reunion. The hill does us good. It makes us better runners. But it hurts like crazy.

The workout in a nutshell: First, we did the standard 2 mile warmup into the cemetery and back to the bottom of the Hill Of Death. Then we went right into our hill suicides. The hill suicides consisted of three levels of torture, each one higher and more grueling than the last. After the third level of torture, we ran back down the other side of the hill to the bottom (the hill is a giant loop), and started the whole cycle over again. After two rounds of hill suicides, we did a steady-state sort of run to the cemetery entrance and back (about 1.5 miles) and then headed to the track for some form drills and strides. For the strides, we did 4 x 150m, and 2 x 200m. I would like you all to take note of my pace during those strides (laps 18, 20, 22, 24, 26 and 28), because most of them were sub-7:00 pace. Which goes a long way to explaining why they felt so freaking hard!


It should be fairly obvious from the elevation plot where the hill suicides are (the two sets of three increasingly-larger peaks in the middle). And it should be obvious where the track work was too, because the elevation plot is flat as a board (and the pace graph is all kinds of crazy!).

All in all, a very good workout. And my injured husband, who was sitting it out on the sidelines, to get a lot of it on video... so maybe I will put together a video this weekend for you all, my fabulous readers... I know you can hardly wait!

Peace. Love. Train.

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