I decided to do 3 sets, where one set is running up the hill and down again for a total of 1 km. My first run up that hill was tentative. I reached the top in 5:48. Immediately after reaching the top of the hill, I turned around, restarted my stopwatch, and ran back down again (no rest). I got to the bottom in 3:08. On the bottom I had a 3 or 4 minute rest before the next set. The other two sets in order were 4:56 to the top, 2:59 to the bottom and the last set was 4:49 to the top and 2:47 to the bottom.
As you can see, each set was faster than before. After the third set I ran another easy cool down on the flat of 2 km for a total workout today of about 7 km.
Obviously, on the way up I was pushing off on the balls of my feet and also landing on them too. I was avoiding hunching over since this compresses my stomach and diaphragm, robbing me of oxygen. This will happen as you get tired and must be consciously avoided. On the way down I began getting used to landing on the balls of my feet so really there is no difference between up and down hills in that respect, or maybe only minor differences.
The easiest difference to notice on the downhill was the foot sliding forward inside my running shoes because of the foot strike on the balls of my feet rather than the heel. However, this was not a problem. I imagine if this went on for much longer or was repeated too frequently (heavy emphasis on imagine), that maybe blisters might appear, but they did not in today’s workout. The other item that is worthy of note was the tremendous difference between a front foot strike on the balls of the feet and a heel strike. I experimented briefly with a heel strike. Very briefly, because the brute force and shock of the heel landing was so much greater than a soft, ball of the foot landing – that it just blew me away. The best analogy I can come up with on short notice is that a heel strike is like hitting your heel with a 175 pound sledge hammer swinging wildly (or whatever weight you are plus the acceleration of gravity and your speed). A ball strike is more like a gentle push. Not only is the hammer strike avoided, but whatever forces are happening are distributed over a much longer period of time and so are much softer. This is because of the rolling effect of the ball strike which absorbs and deflects the forces rather than a heel strike which stops them all instantly, like a bullet hitting a steel plate. The braking effect of a heel strike is probably why I have been having so much fatigue and injury in my previous trail runs. I just did not pay attention to my downhill technique and although often I landed on the ball of my foot going downhill, all too frequently I was heel striking. If you actually pay attention to this in your own hill training, you can immediately see the great difference in shock value between ball and heel strikes. You can see and feel the difference. You know that heel strikes stop you dead in your tracks – then you sort of arc over all stiff legged like a pole vault as you are pulled downhill by gravity. No wonder I was getting trashed so quickly on the downhills. It’s true that you can go faster in certain downhill situation with a heel strike, but it’s murdering you and chances are your pace on other portions of a course will suffer. So in the long run, it is better to go a bit slower and stay in control.
One other aspect of running downhill is cadence. Like running uphill, your cadence is quicker than on the flat but for different reasons. Running up hill, your cadence is greater (or should be) because you want to reduce the anaerobic effort and stay in the aerobic zone. So your pace is slower than on the flat but your effort is the same. Or that is the ideal goal to strive for. If your stride is too long you risk pulling the muscle you are pushing off with, so you have to shorten your stride. To compensate, you increase your cadence – still your pace will be slower. But in running downhill the cadence increases and the stride shortens not because you lack the strength for a longer stride, but because you want to stay in control so that you don’t begin to heel strike and thus have to begin braking your descent in an inefficient and dangerous manner. Still, your stride will be linger than on the uphill. You do not want to lean over backwards and you do not want to heel strike nor go so fast that you have to begin the braking effort. So rather than one large and destructive heel brake, you hold back gently all the time. Today’s effort made me think that I would have sore muscles the next day because of the extra work that the muscles on the top of my foot leading up into the front of my lower shin muscles were doing as they helped me to stay in control of the fast downhill without a heel strike. I guess I won’t know that until tomorrow morning but I am sure that they were doing extra work they were not accustomed to today.
Again, I decided to keep the workout relatively short today so as to not over do a new thing and get injured. But I am getting a feel for it – something you will never get from just reading about it – and I think I did fairly well.
It should help me in my trails runs. My next trail run is July 17th and I am sure this will make a huge difference. I’ll let you all know. I do not want to push hill training too much until after that race since it would be too easy for me to trash myself so I will do only one more similar hill training workout next Sunday and leave it at that until after the race. But after the race I have a half marathon on the trails in September with a lot of steep hills in Devon and I will absolutely be doing a lot more hill training. The last thing I have to say today is that although I did not go far nor fast, I can sure feel the effects of today’s hill training session. If you want to do some hill training, make absolutely sure you do not do too much on the first (or the second) day.