Another hill workout ...

Tuesday - 3 miles

• 3.45 miles, 40' 05 minutes, 11' 36" min/mile average pace, 157 BPM average heart rate

This morning's run went fantastically. I needed this one to go well. Saturday's run was really disheartening and I don't know how motivated I would have stayed if this run didn't go well. When the alarm went off this morning, I said to myself as I rolled out of bed to turn it off that I would not go back to sleep. I really wanted to get my run in this morning so I did. I had a funny feeling that I was going to be stuck at work today and I wanted to make sure my day started off on the right foot.

Rather than randomizing the hills, I chose to do a custom hill workout. I steadily increased the belt incline from 0% to 5%, which is about all I can handle. Eventually, I hope be able to increase the incline more but I haven't really set a goal for that. The three half marathons that I am running have fairly flat courses so my hill workouts are for my own personal benefit. Although anyone who has ever walked through the Walt Disney World Theme Parks knows that there are some fairly steep inclines in some areas. Without knowing what the actual race profile is, all I can really do is work towards improving my leg strength and slowly increasing my threshold belt incline. I like doing this style of hill workout because it allowed me to gradually build up to the max incline and then slowly back down to original incline. The randomized hill workout doesn't really do that at all.

Even though last Thursday's easy run suggested that I might be able increase my max belt pace above 4.0 mph, I decided not to for my run today. My heart rate did still get up to an appropriate level for this type of workout. Maybe next week, I will increase the belt pace to 4.5 or even 5.0 during my hill workout. Although if I do that, then my tempo runs should increased to pace to about 5.5 or 6.0 mph.