It's already getting harder.
So I'm here at Old Buck Trail with our good friend Jeff and with Audrée,
and today we're going to do a hill workout. We're going to do 5 times 5 minutes, running uphill at a
zone 3 effort, so sort of a lactic threshold, and then a hard downhill back to the start,
with a 3-minute recovery. So you ready for this workout? Can't wait. The only thing better than
Old Buck is Old Buck repeats. But we're going to start by doing a quick 20 minute warm-up first.
We just finished about 20 minutes of easy running, just getting set up here on Old Buck Trail, and
yeah we'll see how it goes.
You guys ready? Yeah. Okay, here we go.
So zone 3 should be just too hard to talk, kind of like this. Probably started a bit fast.
Really breathing heavy, so I'm gonna try to
adjust a little bit, slow down so that I can finish this workout feeling good.
Just one minute left.
Okay, that's 5 minutes, now we run back downhill as hard as we can.
Hey buddy, hey.
The
downhill part is a lot more fun.
Just 4 more to go. Oh, I probably shouldn't have went to the gym immediately before this.
So hill workouts are essentially speed work for trail runners.
I find that it lessens your chance of injury. Instead of trying to run fast on a track, running
hard uphill but with the same cardiovascular benefits, as well as helping with strength,
and then of course on the downhill. You're also working strength,
so today we're doing up and down, which is like both an eccentric and a concentric workout in one.
Okay, that's 3 minutes.
Here we go for lap 2.
It's already getting harder.
It's not getting any easier.
One minute to go.That's three. Just two more to go.
Alright, three minutes.
Three, two, one.
That's four.
okay flat five
Made it and this is the last downhill and I'm running
pretty much as hard as I can to stay in front of the boys. I don't want them to catch me.
Glad to have that one done,. Hay in the barn. And now we're just going to do a little cooldown.
Sushi time? Taco time! Are we having tacos? Yeah. Oh, okay. So that's what a typical mid-week
workout looks like for me as I continue to train for my goal race, the Quebec Mega Trail hundred
miler in mid-August. And these kind of workouts form a really important part of my training,
along with of course my weekend long runs. I sometimes do longer uphill tempo intervals at
closer to 8 to 15 minutes, as well as shorter intervals that may be closer to maximal effort.
Some workouts will just be downhill repeats and occasionally both up and down like in this
afternoon's workout. But as I mentioned earlier in the video, I don't really do a lot of flat speed
work or tempo work when I'm training for mountain ultra marathons because I find I can get a lot of
the same benefits from hill work with a lower risk of injury and simulating more closely the
type of terrain that I'll be racing on. And I'm pretty lucky that I can work with a coach, Eric
Carter of Ridgeline Athletics, who schedules these very specific workouts into my training program.
And I find that this is really one of the biggest benefits in working with a coach is just having
somebody else with a lot of experience who can schedule these really strategic workouts into
a program. Because like they say, in an ultra marathon, we're all out there running at around
60% of maximum effort. The question is, 60% of what? And it's with this type of speed work this
type of strategic training that we can increase our maximum effort which can really make that 60%,
that race pace during an ultra marathon, feel a lot easier and allow you to go a lot faster.
So I hope you found that interesting and maybe fun to watch, and let me know in the comments if
you'd like to see more videos about my training and about speed work specifically. Next weekend,
I'll be running a 100k on our local trails here and I'm really looking forward to showcasing the
beautiful trails that we have on the North Shore. So stay tuned for that. And I'd love to hear what
kind of intensity workouts you guys do, if any, so let me know in the comments below.