Intervals – Year 3, Week 3

Smiling, Happy, People

Summer is heading out, It may be gone some time. No so great for a sun-worshipper like myself, but much more pleasant for running hard efforts without feeling like your head is on Venus. Short efforts at a high intensity today meant a long, relaxed, warm-up along the valley park before we confronted the hill. 2 reps as easy as possible, ensuring everyone felt comfortable. The aim today was to work on the feeling that hills don’t ‘have’ to be really hard. The first drill was a heel flick. The heel flick over-exaggerates the stride length. This is to encourage hip, glutes and hamstring activation. In addition this avoids the scuffing that happens as the stride naturally shortens up an incline. The second drill was a ‘prancing pony’, giving a very bouncy stride that requires a lot more effort. This starts to shorten the stride whilst keeping the feet clear of the floor (no energy sapping scuffing). The springiness is harder work on the lower leg, so we don’t want to do too much at this stage. Everybody noted that they didn’t really notice they were running up an incline at all. The third and final drill was to increase the cadence, aiming for 180 strides per minute. This will reduce the stride length, whilst keeping the bounciness that we trained earlier. Then we hit the hill hard, aiming to run as fast as we can. The full session looked like this:

Warm-up A 2.5km easy running
Warm-up B – 2 hill repeats no rest, very easy pace
Drill 1 – heel flick – x2 hill repeats (walk down)
Drill 2 – prancing pony – x2 hill repeats (walk down)
Drill 3 – 180bpm cadence – x1 hill repeat (walk down)
Maximum speed effort x 3 hill repeats (walk down)
Warm-down, walk back to meeting point.

Strava link to the segment and to my run

Table of Awesome Speed
me – 29s
David – 32s
Chris – 34s
Mark – 35s
Stephanie – 39s
Mel – 39s
Stacy – 41s
Bob – 43s

Just the one coached session for Redway Runners this week. Back to two again next week.

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