TRAINING NOTES

As a coach it is my job to teach you now and then so you can think about what you are doing out there.

I realized something last week (or is it that I realized it again). I started running and did the majority of my high level training on rolling hills in New York’s Hudson Valley. Training on anything flat was rare so I naturally became a strong hill runner. The thing is, around here in Boston it is hard to find hills naturally to train on so we are weak hill runners. What I realized is that we are the product of our terrain.

It’s not all bad news though. By building our running economy on our flatter terrain we can still be strong hill runners. How do we do that? We work on getting faster. But we still need to work on uphill running mechanics since those don’t come naturally to us.

A word of advice though. We probably shouldn’t go looking for races with a plethora of rolling hills.