Running Hill Reps

Sunday mornings usually have me doing a run and a swim these days, and last Sunday was no exception. I couldn’t swim at Machynlleth as the Aquathlon was on and I was supposed to be doing hill reps anyway, so would be better off running on my own. I therefore headed into Aberystwyth nice and early.

I parked by the uni pool and then had a nice easy run down the hill, along the seafront and off towards Constitution Hill. This is where the pain started with 8x 2 minute hill reps. They were of course pretty hard, but hill reps are supposed to be. Each one was pretty much a maximal effort by the top, hitting my maximum heart rate of around 164bpm, but hopefully it’s building some strength. I haven’t done much high intensity training for a while so it was a bit of a shock to the system, but once again that’s the whole point. Periodising your training means that what you are doing is always changing so that your body has to constantly adapt and hopefully improve.

The run did of course create some nice pretty graphs as well. The blue filled area is elevation, the red line my heart rate.

HR and Elevation from Hill Reps

HR and Elevation from Hill Reps

It’s odd that some of the hills seem lower than others and that some of them are below sea level, but I thinks that’s an issue with the barmoteric atlimeter in my new Garmin 910XT. The trouble with barometric altimeters is that they are affected by barometric pressure and therefore changes in the weather will affect their accuracy. GPS manufacturers seem to promote barometric altimeters as being features of their devices, touting them as being the best thing to have. Yes, they are more accurate when out in the real world and therefore useful to people hiking in the hills, but GPS devices without barometric altimeters can still provide you with elevation data once you download the run data to a computer as they are able to look up elevation data from maps. For me, this has always proved more reliable. I’ll have to see if there is a way to turn off the altimeter in the 910XT.

After the hill reps it was an easy recovery along the seafront and then another hill climb back to my car at the uni pool and a few laps around the running track to cool down.

Next up was a swim in the pool. This consisted of 9x 300m, alternating between swimming with fins, swimming with paddles and swimming with my feet tied together.

By now the sun was up and a glorious day was on the cards. I met Anna and Morgan in Aberystwyth, where we watched the surfers at Bath Rocks (which was working really well), before walking along the prom to Old College where we were due to do the Sport Relief Mile with a few of Morgan’s friends. It was only a mile and I’d be ‘running’ with Morgan so hadn’t really planned it too well and had to do it wearing my normal clothes, a nice warm pair of heavy jeans and a ‘T’-shirt. Whilst waiting for the start, we were told that the route went along the seafront and then up Constitution Hill to the finish at the top – No, not another hill!!!

The run went well, Morgan, Cameron and I went off together whilst Rachel, James and Theo dropped back. The three of us managed to run the whole way to the bottom of the hill, but once we started climbing, it wasn’t long before the boys were reduced to walking along with everyone else. Had they kept running I would have stayed with them, but I wasn’t too disappointed to have to walk either. Running up yet another hill and this time in jeans wasn’t really something I was looking forward to.

We’d done our bit for Sport Relief and rewarded ourselves with and ice cream and then some lunch on top of ‘Consti’ where we sat in the sunshine admiring the lovely views of Aberystwyth.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Avatar forComment Author

Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

You may also like...