So I made the mistake of giving Traci some back issues of Runner’s World, and when I show up at the hills course on Friday she wants to do sprints.
And you know what? I loved it.
Up til now, we’ve always obeyed this sign at the Vera Cruz hills…
We started out with a 2-mile warmup down a side road that’s got some more gradual climbs. Then, instead of just running our 1 mile down-and-backs over the hills at a fairly steady pace, like we’ve been doing for the last three years or so, we run as hard as we can up the hills and walk down.
It was awesome. Instead of that gradual drain on our energy reserves, we’d recover just enough from the downhill walk that we felt ready to attack the next hill. And because we knew we’d get to walk afterward, we really did go hard. There was none of that usual feeling of dread that drags us down mentally as well as physically.
We only did 2 miles of hill sprints, but our legs were definitely feeling the burn at that point, so we finished up with another 2 miles down the side road for a cool down.
It was a great workout. And it was cool to realize that we’d “tricked” ourselves into incorporating intervals on a 6-miler, which is something we‘ve talked about for weeks but had never gotten around to actually doing.
