Hill Surge-ery
Hill session – 1 hour
Primrose Hill
Long gone are the days when I would lay in bed until lunchtime on a Saturday morning. I was up by 8.30 for breakfast and then made my way down to Primrose Hill (on the bus) to meet the Serpies for their Saturday morning hill session. It was a chilly morning and my legs were still a little stiff after a hard week of training – particularly my calf muscles, which are so pumped right now that it feels like they might rip out of my trousers, Incredible Hulk style, at any moment.
This week, we were focusing on race technique and how you can use hills to shoot your way up the field. I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but it was a really fun session!
We started with the usual jog warm up, and then got in formation for ‘surges’. You’ve probably seen cyclists doing this in the Tour De France – it’s when you run in a small line, say 4 people long, with a gap between you and the next person and whoever is as the back has to sprint to the front, then give a signal for the next person to do the same. In this fashion, you are regularly challenged to put in some extra effort, but can recover while other people are taking their turn. I loved it. We did this up and down a moderate hill for 10-15 minutes. I felt very fit and able to keep with the pace.
After the surging, we moved onto a steeper path, which was marked out with cones a quarter, half and three-quarters of the way up. The same had been done on a similar path back down, forming a circuit. Our coach explained that in a race, when you approach a hill, most people will either keep going at the same pace and get tired about two thirds of the way up and start walking, or slow down immediately and take forever to get up. This is your opportunity to take advantage. Instead of trying to speed up at the foot of the hill, slow down your pace but keep your effort constant – a bit like a cyclist will keep pedalling at the same speed but will change down in their gears. Then when you are three quarters of the way up, just as everyone else is tiring, you start sprinting and keep that sprint up until you are a quarter of a way down the other side, then jog recovery until you are at the bottom, by which time you will have passed half of the field!
Brilliant advice! We did around 6 circuits of the hill, practising this technique (during which, I was able to get past everyone in my group!), and that was the end of the session. I still felt relatively fresh, so I jogged home.
Great fun and a beautiful morning too! I will definitely try and make these hill sessions a regular part of my training. I’m sure that they are helping my stamina and it’s a really sociable way of training.
Primrose Hill
Long gone are the days when I would lay in bed until lunchtime on a Saturday morning. I was up by 8.30 for breakfast and then made my way down to Primrose Hill (on the bus) to meet the Serpies for their Saturday morning hill session. It was a chilly morning and my legs were still a little stiff after a hard week of training – particularly my calf muscles, which are so pumped right now that it feels like they might rip out of my trousers, Incredible Hulk style, at any moment.
This week, we were focusing on race technique and how you can use hills to shoot your way up the field. I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but it was a really fun session!
We started with the usual jog warm up, and then got in formation for ‘surges’. You’ve probably seen cyclists doing this in the Tour De France – it’s when you run in a small line, say 4 people long, with a gap between you and the next person and whoever is as the back has to sprint to the front, then give a signal for the next person to do the same. In this fashion, you are regularly challenged to put in some extra effort, but can recover while other people are taking their turn. I loved it. We did this up and down a moderate hill for 10-15 minutes. I felt very fit and able to keep with the pace.
After the surging, we moved onto a steeper path, which was marked out with cones a quarter, half and three-quarters of the way up. The same had been done on a similar path back down, forming a circuit. Our coach explained that in a race, when you approach a hill, most people will either keep going at the same pace and get tired about two thirds of the way up and start walking, or slow down immediately and take forever to get up. This is your opportunity to take advantage. Instead of trying to speed up at the foot of the hill, slow down your pace but keep your effort constant – a bit like a cyclist will keep pedalling at the same speed but will change down in their gears. Then when you are three quarters of the way up, just as everyone else is tiring, you start sprinting and keep that sprint up until you are a quarter of a way down the other side, then jog recovery until you are at the bottom, by which time you will have passed half of the field!
Brilliant advice! We did around 6 circuits of the hill, practising this technique (during which, I was able to get past everyone in my group!), and that was the end of the session. I still felt relatively fresh, so I jogged home.
Great fun and a beautiful morning too! I will definitely try and make these hill sessions a regular part of my training. I’m sure that they are helping my stamina and it’s a really sociable way of training.
posted by Jonathan @ 1:57 PM
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