Hill training

My training week is broken down into three core sessions, a long run at the weekend, a decent mixed paced (either a Fartlek, interval or threshold) run and a long hill session. Today I ran one of the long hill or Kenyan hill sessions which comprised of quite simply running up and down a fairly challenging hill four times. My local hill is One Tree Hill which is close to Honor Oak Park train station, a climb which I have become quite familiar with as it's part of he route I take to get to Peckham Common where I do quite a lot of my running at present. I run up one side, down the other to East Dulwich Road where I turn around and repeat the process. The route is about one and a half miles long so after a few reps the miles start to stack up.

So what's the point? What advantage is there to putting my legs through this kind of self inflicted torture? Well I first read about Kenyan Hill sessions in an article in Runners World magazine just before I started training for the 2006 London Marathon. Having struggled around the Cologne Marathon I was determined to finish the London race with a little more style than the exhausted heap I ended up with in Germany. Reading the article the writer had spent some time in Kenya training with the National athletics team where one day they went out for a hill training session. Our journalist had been used to hill training sessions that comprised of short, fast runs up hills so off he set, pounding his way to the top only to discover that the whole Kenyan national Marathon team wasn't even half way up the hill. The Kenyans were jogging at a steady pace as he passed them on the way back down and by the time he's turned around he had caught up with them again they had only just reached the summit. The Journalist managed a couple more reps before his knees started to ache but the Kenyans went on, maintaining a steady pace, jogging to the top and then recovering on the way down for another four hours. FOUR HOURS!

Kenyan Hill sessions are designed to help build deep muscle strength, the kind of muscle you need late on in a marathon post about 20 miles when all your glycogen reserves have been used up and you're really staring to hurt. There are many advantages to this kind of training for example:

• Developing your aerobic capacity; your body learns to use oxygen more efficiently over longer distances.
• Increased stamina, enabling you to run longer and further.
• Improved running action (biometrics), giving you a spring in your step than enables you to develop a longer stride length and reduced stress with ground impact.

Reading the article I was impressed. This sounded like just the kind of thing I needed to help boost my strength so off I went, looking for an appropriate hill. Fortunately, at that time I was living in Charlton, an area of South East London that is basically on a hill and just down the road from me was Shooters Hill one of the highest points in London. Actually, Shooters Hill is probably a bit too big for a Kenyan Hill session but I did it anyway, starting of with two climbs. I can still remember the way I felt after the first time I did it, I was in absolute agony!

There is another very good reason for doing these kind of training sessions and that's a psychological one. I can pretty much guarantee that the way you feel as you reach the summit on you 4th or 5th rep, your legs will feel not dissimilar to the way you'll feel at the end of a marathon. You will want to stop. This kind of mental preparation is invaluable, you might get it on some of your longer distance training runs but you get it every time on a Kenyan session.