Hill Climb Workout

Hill Climb Workout

Before you begin a hill climb workout, do yourself a favor and warmup. That includes light jogging, some stretching and some more running that gets the blood pumping.

Why you ask? Well, there's nothing like going from a complete standstill to a full blown workout with cold muscles. You will pay the price ... enough said.

Hill climbs can be a "frustrating" workout for the runner. It's a workout that doesn't cover much ground. But the rewards are you get an expectional workout in a little amount of time.

Since I grew up in Tacoma Washington, I had the "honor" of running all over town during high school. And I mean that literally. From Point Defiance to the south end of town, I covered almost all of Tacoma on foot while running.

One of the best (read "brutal") hill climbing workouts was in the north end of town that faced the Port of Tacoma. This well established older section was built on the side of a rather steep hills. I forget exactly what street this is, but the run I am going to explain was on a steep cobbled street just below a parochial elementary school.

We would jog the few miles from high school down to the bottom of this "hill". After stretching and listening to the coach's workout for us, it was time to get started.

This hill was about as perfect as you could get for a workout. At the bottom was a flat street that ran perpendicular to the hill. This gave us about 10 meters to start out on the flats and pick up some speed before we hit the hill. Once the hill began, arms started pumping and the heart rate increased. Now here's the second part that made this hill just about perfect. About a third of the way up was another cross road. This was a perfect place to finish the first climb. Now instead of jogging back down the same hill, we could jog around the block and lose some altitude before starting up again. When I was in high school, the knees really didn't bother me that much. But now that I have put a few years on the old body, I can appreciate that loop back down.

The workout basically continues in the same fashion, except that each time we would run farther up the hill (two more times). Then we would work are way down, instead of running the whole hill, we ran two thirds, then one third. Then we were done.

Keep in mind that since we jogged down there, we had to jog back. Sometimes I think that was the toughest part of the whole workout.