Basecamp-Week 10

TRAINING WEEK

QUALITY - HILL SERIES Part II

1-2 miles warm-up/cool-down; 2-3 miles of hills run in a series. 

This is a continuation of our hill training. Please refer to Weeks, 4, 6 & 8 for a basic primer on hills & Week 6 specifically for addressing a Hill Series. In this session we are going to run a series of hills. The reason for this is to begin to get a better ability to manage & control your efforts on both the uphill & the downhill portions of a series of hills. When you run hill repeats, the hill gets broken up into two different portions: up & down, obviously. When you run a series of hills, the hill becomes one entity, both the up & the down sections & the way you approach each will play a part in how difficult the hills are in effort. For this first hill series, we’ll be adopting the same approach we took with the hill reps: just run up & down the hills...do not focus on running hard or fast, or easy or slow. You do not need to run at any specific pace or effort. Try to run the uphill & downhills as smoothly & relaxed as possible. 
What is a hill series? You have room for creativity here. You can just use a series of hills in your neighborhood or around your workplace. You can run out & back on a series of hills or make a loop that has a few hills on it that you can link together. You can add as much order as you want or allow a little chaos to reign & just run what shows up! A reminder that we are NOT looking for very steep hills that will require you to walk up them. Of course, if you do have to walk, that’s okay. But you shouldn’t try to add difficulty to this session by making an extremely challenging route. We are trying to learn how to modulate or effort, pace & body mechanics based on running up or down hill. We do not want to add additional stress into the situation. 

If you need to use a treadmill see if you have a series programmed option in your treadmill’s software. Alot of them have this feature already available, if not, you can create a random assortment of hills of varying lengths & inclines. If your treadmill does not have a series option then set up hills by varying the length & incline on your own. Keep your hill lengths between 100-400 meters & vary the incline between 2-6%. Remember to leave the speed alone. Choose a pace you can easily sustain on the flats that becomes more challenging as the grade/incline increases. 

We are increasing the total hill series run volume from 1-2 miles to 2-3 miles, but you can extend this if you want to do more, especially the 50-60 mpw group.

SPEED ECONOMY

In this SE session I am bringing back the hills & builds from Week 7 Find a shorter hill (maybe 50-100m long, if using the treadmill I suggest 75 meters at 4% grade) to use for this session that has a flat road or track adjacent to the hill. The hill can be a little steeper than the hill reps/series hills but it does not have to be. We are working on strong, beautiful running mechanics as we run up a hill. You want to focus on pushing off the ground, driving your knees up & your elbows back as you stay tall. Do NOT run hard. Just run with beautiful form. Walk back down the hill. Do four of these & then take a 5 min rest.

Then, on the road or the track, do four (4) 400m BUILD reps where you accelerate each 100m getting faster throughout the long rep. Start at a medium hard effort for 100m, build a little fast the next 100m, build again to hard effort on the 3rd 100m & by the final 100m you should be running really fast & relaxed. Take a full 400m easy jog after each BUILD. 

LONG RUN

• 30-40 mpw: 10-12M EASY
• 40-50 mpw: 14M EASY
• 50-60 mpw: 16M EASY

FUNDAMENTAL 

COMMUNITY - Listen to the episode, as usual.