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Strength Practice
Can you find some hills to run on? This practice will have you climbing in order to develop more strength. And, it is not merely muscle strength that you are building. You are building your attention and motor control to hold up under more strenuous running conditions. The whole point is to build more muscular strength for precise movement patterns. If you let form deteriorate on hills then this defeats the purpose of this kind of specific muscle+motor control training.
The hills you choose can be a gradual climb or steep, though you should aim for easier slope for the first few weeks if you are new to running on hills.
Hopefully, the length of the climb is long enough to have you running uphill for at least 1 minute continuously before it levels off or heads downhill again.
The Strength Practice assignments will give you an overall distance to run and then prescribe a certain amount of minutes you should stay on the hills during that run.
For example, the assignment may be to run for 3 miles continuously, with 12 minutes of that being done on hills. This would be written ‘3 miles, 12 min hills’. It would be better to have that 12 minutes broken up into up-and-down the hill intervals, so that you can work your running form and muscles in both the uphill and downhill modes. You may certainly run for several minutes continuous if you like, but be sure to include some downhill work also.
If you are close enough to a hilly section of town you may start your run on the flats, and then head into the hills for the assigned minutes and then return to the flats to finish. If you live in a hilly section you might be challenged in finding a flat section to run in!
If you are not near a hilly section of town, you may know of a short section of slope somewhere nearby that would allow you to do repeats up and down for several minutes – a short hill or a long, paved ramp in a park, or a sloping section of a park. It might even be a series of stairs in a park or stadium.
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