Hill Work for Building Strength in Legs, Hips and Glutes

I did another hill session today. First time I measured the hill and discovered just how much mileage I was putting on my legs during one of these little sessions.

I had first estimated the distance to be about half a track lap, a 220 or about an 8th of a mile (.125 mile). Today, I put it on DailyMile and it came out to about a tenth of a mile, which seems reasonable.



I also put into practice a tip I read in the hardcopy of Runner’s World pertaining to hill training:

Run Better: Running fast downhill will improve your leg turnover, which will boost your speed and help prepare your body for downhill segments in races.

Reducing the rest time between repeats and increasing my speed down hill allowed me to bring the overall loop time down to 73 seconds giving a total time of 49 minutes. What I didn’t realize is that this comes out to just over 6 minutes for 5 loops or about a mile, for 40 loops or about 8 miles.

This is more pounding than a track workout!

Anyway, the total exposure time is about 2.5 hours, which includes the run out to the location and back.