Addendum to Know Your Course: Run Down Hills

If you're training for a hilly course, it's sometimes not the uphills that hurt, believe it or not it's the downhills! The worst after-race pain I've ever had is when I drew a downhill leg on a running relay that lost over a 1000 feet of elevation in a couple of miles. I could barely walk for a day or two afterwards.

Many athletes train using hill repeats, but when they do they run up the hill but walk back down. Downhill running uses different muscles than either flat or uphill running, and those muscles need training too. So if you're training for a hilly course, don't forget to run down hill!

As a side note, a couple of years ago we biked through Umbria and Tuscany in Italy with the kids. One of the things we loved were these signs "warning" us of hills ahead. As you can see, the signs were usually not necessary (could you actually miss the fact that there's a hill looming ahead of you?). We called these signs "boobs ahead" just because of the image on the sign and the kids got a kick out of spotting them. Since pretty much all of Tuscany is hilly, we saw them frequently (and grew to fear them at times when we were getting tired!)

Yesterday I ran almost 3 hours of hilly trails around town (our area resembles Tuscany in more ways than one - lots of hills, lots of wineries, ah if we only had more gelato) and am happy to report that I'm barely sore at all this morning. Hooray for hill training!

Finding Your Climbing Power

It's that time of year: when we look at our upcoming races and the terrain we'll need to cover, and we start to get more specific in our training. If your races involve hills, that means training on hills. Over the years, I've been lucky enough to cycle with some great hill climbers and learn a few tips that have made me a better climber. I'm still learning and growing as a cyclist, but here's a few things I've learned along the way:

While it might look dramatic on TV to be climbing while standing on the pedals (in fact, I had to laugh out loud when I watched the Ironman Florida television coverage - the footage they got from the bike course was of athletes standing on their pedals to climb the only "hill" on the course, an overpass. The triathletes were just stretching out their legs after miles and miles of flat windy riding, there was no other reason to get up off your seat on that tiny incline!), in reality you're often better off staying seated while climbing. This is especially important if your build tends toward the sturdy and muscular and not to the slim and whippetlike. A top road biker who is an expert climber will generally weigh (in pounds) no more than twice his height (in inches). Yes, that's  144 pounds for a 6' tall male. If you haven't yet (or never want to) achieve this body style, every extra pound you carry will cost you in the climb.

Staying seated has many advantages: it keeps your weight partially supported by your saddle instead of by the muscles in your legs (a rule of thumb is that you use about 10% more energy as soon as you stand up to climb), it uses less of your core and arm muscles (fewer muscles engaged equals less oxygen consumed), it utilizes your legs and glutes more effectively with less wasted motion, and it allows you to keep up a faster more consistent cadence.

In order to stay seated, you have to use your gears wisely. Many triathletes who are not yet comfortable on their bikes tend to avoid shifting as much as possible. You wouldn't do this in your car, where you would hear your engine lugging or over-revving when you refused to shift. Your body is doing the same thing when you don't shift to keep your cadence constant. So picking the right gear for the start of the hill and then staying on the shifters to maintain your cadence in the 70 - 90 range is crucial. Keep those pedals spinning and your heart rate in a manageable zone as you cruise up the hill. Hammering a hill and flooding your muscles with lactic acid (especially in a race) might look cool in the moment, but is a recipe for disaster. Those lactic-flooded legs will feel dead on the run!

If you do need to stand, either to change body position, give your back a break, or because the hill is too steep to stay seated, work on keeping a steady line while rocking the bike back and forth underneath you. This is a skill that will come with practice, but many triathletes weave and wobble when they stand on hills, potentially endangering any athletes trying to pass on the side. So when you're out training on hills, be sure to get some practice with standing climbs. Use your body weight to help you push down on the pedals and let the bike travel side-to-side underneath you, but not too far (6 - 8 inches is enough). Observe the track of your wheels and make sure you're still traveling in a straight line. Don't lean way far forward over the handlebars as this takes efficiency away from your legs, try keeping your weight centered over your cranks as much as possible. Don't forget that just before you stand you may need to shift into a higher gear to account for the increased power of a standing climb.

Best way to get good at hills: stop fearing them and start doing them. I know I used to hate hills but now I kind of find that I like them. I've started tracking my times on some local doozies so I know when I'm getting better over the course of  a season, and even when I've started off a new season with better climbing skills than I started the last one. This year's Crossfit training has made me a stronger hill climber with lower body weight and more power, so I'm eager to see how I'll stack up against my benchmark hills this season!

The Hills Come Back Alive

Our little home Crossfit gym has spawned a group that's going to go and do their first triathlons at Blue Lake this year. So with the weather getting marginally better, it's been time to head out on more runs and bikes and spend less time throwing kettlebells and medicine balls around.

We've done some great track workouts, often taking the bikes and trainers down to the track to do bike/run repeats. Friday we met up at a local park that's at the bottom of a butte with a nice road running to the top providing a few hundred feet of elevation gain over a short distance. Just perfect for hill repeats! This is the first time I've been on the hills with my arm, and it held up pretty well. Until you do something like injuring your elbow, you don't realize what a horizontal load you place on your arms when you're climbing on the bike, but it takes a lot of strength in those muscles and joints to stabilize the bike as you stand up and grind up a hill.

All is well though, and I think I'm good to start adding hills back into the repertoire. Hooray!

Up the Down Hill

Here's how to spice up a downhill ride: I was out yesterday on one of my favorite hills. It's about 7 miles of gradual winding up one side, and 3.5 miles of brutal uphill on the other, so you can take your pick which way you want to go, depending on your mood. It's been unseasonably warm here and I'm actually still riding in shorts, and the long side was sunny so I decided to head up that way. I was pretty toasty on my way up the hill, but down the other side I was on the shady side of the hill away from the setting sun and the descent started getting chilly fast. So I decided to do something new and fun.

I set my watch timer for 1:00 repeating intervals. I descended for one minute, then when the timer beeped I turned around and sprinted uphill for the next minute until it beeped again. This is actually a great exercise in the relativity of time, because time while coasting downhill simply is not the same length as time sprinting uphill. Try it, you'll see what I mean.

So at the end of the ride, I not only got my seven mile hill in, I got about eight more uphill sprints. Then of course I realized that this road puts me at the bottom of the hill separating the valley from my house, and I had one more ridge to climb up and over, then up the hill that my house is on. By the time I hit that road, my legs were completely and utterly toasted. This workout is a good one!

Base season, what base season???

Hills Are My Friends

I used to hate hills, dread hills, fear hills, loathe hills. On the bike, on the run, and I would thank God there's never hills on the swim. Sometime after moving back here to a place where I have to go up and over a big hill just to get to most of the great bike rides, hills became the norm. Just something you do, usually in the first couple miles of every bike ride. Eventually, I realized I was getting stronger on every hill, taking longer to stand up on my pedals. I used to get to the curve sign, now I made it past the mailboxes, now I made it past the picket fence, now all the way to the top. Hills weren't the horrible monsters I had made them out to be, but they still weren't my friends.

One fine late-summer day a couple of years ago, I had an epiphany. Epiphany is a favorite word in our family, largely because of an epic multi-day tournament of Ghost that my husband and I played on a long car trip when we were just dating and barely knew each other. He didn't know yet that his beloved was The Human Thesaurus and Dictionary all rolled into one, otherwise he wouldn't have blithely played word games with me in the car. I got him in several successive games of ghost with words like zweiback, gnu, and epiphany. Though that moment is now going on 16 years in our past, he delights in using the word epiphany in the most random and inappropriate ways, just to get my goat. Yeah, he's like that.

So like I said, I was out on my bike one day and had an epiphany (used correctly here) that hills were really my friends. Every single hill was helping me become stronger. I composed an epic poem about hills that my oxygen-deprived brain promptly forgot (this is most likely a blessing). Since that day, I've relished hills, delighted in hills, passed people up hills whistling dixie, and posted most of my best finishes on hilly courses. I'm too dense (not brain-wise, but body-wise) to be a really great hill climber, but it's no longer my achilles heel.

Yesterday I headed up what used to be a horrendous hill for me, now it's one of my best buds. It's a ride I look forward to and yesterday didn't disappoint with stupendous views out over the blue-layered hills and valleys to the South.

In just about four weeks, the famiglia and I will pack our tandems into suitcases and head for the hill towns of Tuscany and Umbria. I'm using Google Earth to carefully pick routes, but there's no getting around the fact that medieval people used terrain to their best defensive advantage when picking their townsites. Our ascent to our first hill town of Cortona climbs 780 feet in less than two miles. I think we may be pushing our bikes by that time. So over the next month, I face the daunting task of convincing my kids that hills are their friends too. Wish me luck!