Simulating Hills When You Live Somewhere Flat

Audio Transcript

Fisher: Hello everybody, it’s Coach Fisher from Runners Connect, bringing you the extra kick podcast today.

Today, we have a question from Emily.

She asks, “How can you do hill workouts and train for a hilly race, when you live in a really flat area?”

I think that’s a really good question that even I have to deal with on a regular basis, living in Central Indiana where hills are miles away.

First thing I would mention is, you don’t necessarily need to train on hills to learn how to run them, or how to manage effort going up them and get back into pace at the top of each hill.

I believe it was my high school coach who told me a long time ago, that the winner is never the runner who gets to the top of the hill first.

It’s the one that can manage their effort up the hill and then get back into a quicker race pace once they crest the top of the hill.

I always thought that was good insight. It gives me a mind-set of how to approach running hills.

Lesson number one would be learn how to run hills, and focus on keeping a consistent effort through the hill, up and over the hill, and back into race pace at the top of it as quickly as you can.

This is as opposed to trying to maintain the pace going up the hill that you were at on the flat terrain, on the flat ground leading up to the hill.

My second point would be strength training in the gym.

Just like everything else, strength goes from general to specific, and running hills is a very specific way of developing leg strength.

That’s at its simplest point is all hill running is.

Getting in the gym and doing a lot of general exercises. Doing a lot of squats, lunges, a lot of strength work that strengthens the lower leg, the quads, the hamstrings and the gluts.

One thing I would add to this to become better at pounding the down hills, and not fatiguing the quads too much is to work on a lot of eccentric contractions, where you’re slowing down a movement or you’re re-downing and coming off a box jump.

A lot of plyometric stuff would help with that as well. It will also make you stronger of course, but it’s also going to help you work on durability and fatigue resistance.

Work on concentrate contractions, but also eccentric contractions as well.

Third thing I would include on top of, and this kind of is on top of the strength training in the gym or things like strength endurance circuits, where you have a list of exercises, break them up into four or five exercises in the group and you have four or five groups.

You do strides in between or some kind of sprints, nothing too all out or maximum effort, but fairly quickly, short runs in between a group of exercises.

This does a lot of things with changing up the muscle fibre, contractions and routine of how you work and what muscles contract, and how they contract when you start to get tired.

That’s really a lot of things; a lot goes on with the hill. You use a different muscle contraction pattern, different coordination in the brain of the muscles and do it that way.

One way of doing that is including surges in the run, so I would go out on an easy day or a tempo, and try to put in a one minute surge or 30 second surge, in every three or four minutes of a continuous tempo.

This has the same effect of running a hill, where you get above and beyond a threshold, and then you have to come back and get back into your normal routine, and recover while you’re still running at a fairly quick clip.

Just to recap, gym work, strength circuits and putting things like surges in the middle of a tempo run, are great ways to get the most out of hill training, and prepare you for hill training when you don’t have access to hills.

Lastly, one thing you always have to mention is, you could always do hill repeats on if you have a treadmill in the garage, or in the basement, or in the room or something like that.

You can always use some of your tempos or your easy runs on under laid terrain on your treadmill, so that’s another option.

Emily, I hope that answers your question.

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