Training Video 001

Jay, can you explain the context of this exercise? At what point in the training cycle is it done? It looks like it is done after a recovery run. What is the progression? Shorter to longer hills, fewer reps to more reps? I did some Brad Hudson-esque short hill sprints last season with my XC team. Long hill strides seem like a good way to work on leg turnover and speed without sprinting on the track or going all out up a steep hill.

This was shot this past Friday, which was 10 days out from an important race for both athletes, the Houston Half Marathon. We had wanted to do that last hard on Friday, but the weather didn't allow for it, so we moved it to Sunday morning. 10 x 200m is more than we've done this year and so for that reason I considered it a workout (plus they did it fatigued – a 50 minute run, even an easy one, is fatiguing to some degree). However, we need to get to the point where 10x150m or 6-7x200m are just “strides,” but we're not there yet.

This hill is MUCH DIFFERENT than the hill Brad had Dathan and Hartmann run in Boulder. I need to get get video of that hill, but remember, Brad talks about “ramp hills” and the best way to think of it is the grade of a parking garage. Take that and multiple it by 2 and you have the grade of the hill Brad would use. The hill we use has a grade of 2% (4m rise over 200m) and my guess is that Brad's hill is a 20% grade, but I don't know.

I don't really like Brent's mechanics on the hills, yet after working with Sara last year I'm confident that they are a great way to work on posture and front side mechanics. Also, I like this mellow grade as a way to challenge the nervous system in the most sport specific way a runner can be challenged; running. Obviously being mindful of paces is important, yet to me the concept is pretty simple – stride length and frequency aren't that different on this mellow grade than on the flat and as long as you don't try do to 400's and 500's on this type of grade you can get a nice neuromuscular stimulus that is race specific.

Hope that helps and I'll definitely add more to these comments in the coming days.

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What a great way to get your words out there and to get more people to follow you!

It depends on the winter.

This winter it's been great (though today we have snow and ice) and you would not have needed to run indoors to train at 800m specificity. However, most winters you would be annoyed that one out of two or one out of three key workouts you'd need to workout inside and can't. CU's facility is not open to the public. I don't know about the School of Mines (DII, very good program); CU is 200m and tight, Mines even smaller and tighter.

However, there are days when you can run in shorts in every month of year, something that surprises most people from the midwest or northeast.

Good luck with your training and let me know if I can be of help.

Thanks for asking Mark. My understanding of Canova's hill is that they are short and steep. I was present for a couple of Hudson's hill workouts (with Dathan running the hills) when I coach at CU and the hill they use is really steep…about twice as steep as a parking garage incline….maybe three times that steep.

The hill you see in this video is probably just 1-2% and my rationale is that they can run 1,500m pace or 800m pace up it for 150m or 200m (we usually don't go past 200m).

I've gotten away from doing them as of late and that's probably a bad thing. I think they're really useful.

In terms of using them on easy vs. hard days I would say you need to be careful and you would want to keep these as part of your harder sessions at first. I know that at times we've run the hill a couple times, then come to the track for a flat repetition and done sets of that and their nervous system, even with a wired athlete, is fried for several days. So these are great because you can run fast on the hill but I would design a workout that features the hill and not begin by doing them on your easy days.

Hope this is helpful – feel free to ask more questions.