175. How to Train Hills with Coach Elisabeth Scott

I'm not going to be able to do that very efficiently and I'm not going to be able to go very fast because that's very, very challenging to run up a hill of that steepness. And so, you know, I think it's as runners, we tend to think the harder the better, the more complex, the more intense, the more badass, the better. And that's not necessarily the case. Are you constantly worried about getting injured or you don't know how to get faster as a runner and you want to continue to run for stress relief, then this is the podcast for you. Welcome to Healthy Runner, the only place that provides you with training tips, injury recovery and prevention tools with actionable strategies by experts in the running industry so you can develop a stronger running body and feel confident that you can overcome any obstacle as a runner. I'm your host, Dr. Dwayne Scotty, avid runner, running physical therapist and coach, educator, founder of Spark Healthy Runner where we help dedicated runners get stronger, run faster and enjoy lifelong injury-free running with the perfect online running coach, even if you've been told to stop running with an injury or you think coaching is just for fast runners. Learn more about our signature coaching program at learn.sparkhealthyrunner.com. Every week on the show, we coach you to grow as a runner just like the process of building a strong, durable home that will last a lifetime requiring little maintenance. The design and planning is your mindset. The foundation is your strength training. The framing is your run plan. The electrical and plumbing is your nutrition. The insulation, drywall and flooring is your recovery. The landscaping and exterior is your race strategy. If you master the six parts of growing as a runner, your running will be strong and last long, hitting PRs well into your 40s, 50s and beyond. Every week we help a runner just like you build their dream home. I'm your host, Dr. Dwayne Scotty. Welcome to the Healthy Runner podcast. Before we get into this episode, if you are looking for a nutritional advantage to increase mental focus, strength and endurance during those runs and decrease the recovery time between those hard effort sessions, you will want to check out Perform from the Amino Company. Later on in this episode, I will tell you more about Perform and how it can help you stay focused, get harder workouts in and improve overall recovery on your journey of becoming a stronger, faster, lifelong, injury-free runner. Or you can check out the research for yourself at AminoCo.com slash Healthy Runner. If you have ever struggled to run up hills or want to learn how to start hill training for running, this is the episode for you. Maybe you want to learn how to get stronger for running uphill or really what muscles you should strengthen for hill training. Welcome to episode 175 on the Healthy Runner podcast where we help you get stronger, run faster and enjoy lifelong, injury-free running. Today, I have the pleasure of having a repeat guest back on the show who is just awesome. Elizabeth is a marathoner, a coach and an answer seeker. Welcome back to the show, Elizabeth Scott. Thank you for having me excited to be here again. I'm excited to have you back on. Last time you were on the show was back in episode 148 and we kind of did more of a big picture view and chatted about your running story, your background, how your personal struggles with addiction or overcoming injuries, falling backwards into running and really starting the business running explained and talked about a little bit of your Boston qualifying marathon and some of the setbacks that you had as a runner. It was a very, I think, a nice peek behind the curtain, if you will, of kind of who you are, why you do what you do today at Running Explained. So if you are listening to this and you enjoy what Elizabeth has to say, I highly recommend you check out some of her backstory in episode 148. So I am excited to kind of bring you back on the show to really talk about a specific topic today, which is hill training and you do such a wonderful job on your podcast on kind of sharing the why, the when, the how and what are different types of things that we should be doing as runners to really grow as a runner. And once I knew that we really have never done a hill training specific topic for the podcast, I was like, I'm the perfect person. So thank you for accepting my invite to come back on the show. Well hills are near and dear to my heart since I live on a neighborhood that is literally named something mountain. So I have a lot of experience running hills and coaching people to run hills and hilly races and all the things that it takes to, to conquer the hills. Yeah. So in, in really today's episode, we're going to really fill everyone's kind of running bucket. We talk about like six steps to grow as a runner on the show. And one of those steps is our training or running that we're actually doing. And we really try to, you know, maximize this around really optimizing our four basic types of runs such as kind of the easy run, the long run, the temple run, the interval run. But then there is hill training. So this is kind of beyond the basics of kind of mastering those essential elements of running and the actual runs that we're doing. So before we kind of get into that, can you catch us up on what you've been doing since November and what you have just completed yourself? Yeah. So I just ran, I just ran the Boston Marathon. So speaking of hills and this is my first time running Boston and it was a really incredible experience running these majors is always a lot of fun being in the city and seeing all the people and connecting with all the different runners. And so that's, that's the thing that's kind of occupied the biggest chunk of my personal time recently. And I'm now about a week post race, one of my first run back today. I'm feeling pretty good. Obviously not fully recovered because you're not going to recover from your marathon after just a week. It takes longer than that. But yeah, I'm excited to head into a summer of what I'm calling my summer of strength. Very excited. So I'm going to get into some heavy, heavy lifting in my, in my house. And with the business, things are growing, six coaches on my team, expanding new offerings, this is a masterclass on planning your training year for people who are self coached and struggle to understand how to put multiple training cycles together. So a lot of pots on the stove. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Congrats on the business growth and congrats to your Boston Marathon. I actually listened to your recap episode during my run at the end of last week. I think after dropped, I think it was on my long run. I was listening to it. And I thought it was a great recap and kind of getting the full picture and how we kind of reflect after our marathons and our races. And I thought you did a really great job at kind of going through like all the emotions that we go through as runners and how sometimes we can be, you know, harder ourselves, right? And I really enjoyed listening to that episode. So if you've ever finished the marathon and, you know, we're going through and trying to like filter through all those emotions that happened, I thought that was a great episode to check out as well as just hearing about, you know, some of the, the Boston specific hills, which, you know, we're going to get into a little bit today and how you did prepare for that. Some of the training that was included in kind of your Boston marathon training block, but, you know, like, like Kip Chogi, you know, you were really transparent in, you know, some of the struggles that you had on the course as well. So I enjoyed listening to some of that as, you know, many of us were kind of, you know, really distracted on that Monday and it wasn't the most productive workday for many folks. So I really enjoyed your, you know, story in that episode. So thank you for that. Well, thank you. Yeah. So let's get into today's topic. And I guess let's just start with the basics of, you know, what is hill training? Hill training. So I love that you brought up Boston in that. So I think often we talk about becoming a better runner on hills. Nine times out of 10, your mind goes to uphill, right? But hills encompassing, becoming a really good runner with hills encompasses, both running uphill and downhill. I think a large part of our conversation today is probably going to focus more on the uphill part, right? But we can talk about some downhill stuff as well. So hill training is essentially just layering in hills into your training. And there's a variety of ways one can do that. But I think it's very important to remember that hills are hard when you are running up a hill, you are fighting against gravity, just like it's like running upstairs, but you're running up a ramp, right? You are a hill running a hill is going to be harder than running on flat ground. So I like that you kind of, you mentioned kind of the framework of the different types of runs we can do. We can do easy runs. We can do long runs. We can do moderate tempo runs. We can do interval runs. So hills can be a separate thing like, Oh, I do this hill specific thing. Maybe it's a post run hill sprints. I like to call them hard up hills, more of a drill, or you can also layer hills into any one of those other runs. Now it's not going to be as common that you'd have a hilly track workout, for example, right? But layering hills into obviously your easy runs, your long runs and some of those workouts, if you're prepared for it, can be a way to add a little, I'll say, a little oomph into your training, but also going to prepare you to run races that are hilly and generally make you a more well rounded, stronger, more efficient runner. All right. So what I'm hearing there is, is it's not only one specific type of way to do hill training. I'm hearing, you know, there is more of a really diverse way that we can integrate hills into our training, whether that is into the runs that we're already doing or that we are having a separate type of training run that really focuses on those hills. Okay. And when would or why would, you know, someone consider adding hill training into your running workouts? Like let's just say someone doesn't live like where we live in Connecticut where there's like pretty much hills all around. It's not that many flat areas in Connecticut. But there are a lot of runners, a lot of Floridian runners for instance, who are like everything flat, except their bridges. You know, why would you consider really if you were a runner and adding some of the hill training into your workouts? And I can totally identify. I used to be a Floridian runner myself. I used to live in Orlando and it was not uncommon to run 10 miles and maybe gain 14 total feet of elevation. So at the time, you know, I didn't think I needed to add hills because all the races I was running were flat. Right? Why would I need to run hills because all my races are flat? First off, I understand that. Right? So one of the things we want to make sure is that we're practicing this principle of specificity, right? So if we're training for a specific race, we want to make sure we're training for the demands of that specific event. And if your race is pancake flat, do you need to do an absolute crap ton of hills in your training? Probably not. However, for every runner, adding some hills somewhere into their training is likely going to benefit them. Even if it's something, like I said, as simple as post run hard up hills, which are simply more like a drill like strides to work on things like your form and economy and power generation and your turnover, all these things in this neat little package. And then of course, extending all the way to the other end of the spectrum, if you're training for an event that contains a significant number of hills, let's use the Boston Marathon or the New York City Marathon as an example, where you know that you're going to need to run up and down multiple hills at race pace over and over and over again, that's something that you need to do in training as well. So really, when we talk about the spectrum and variety of ways and when you would include hills in your training, there's a lot of flexibility and variation here. But I think the takeaway should be, in my opinion, I'm going to say almost, almost every runner should be including hills somewhere in their training in some form or another. All right. So really, specificity of training you kind of mentioned, especially if you're running a hilly race, we definitely need to expose our bodies to those demands of running on a hill in your training, if you're going to be doing that in your race. But you also kind of mentioned, you know, the, that it will be beneficial for most runners to add in hill training into their workouts. Is there any, you know, benefits to hill training, I guess, beyond any, you know, whether it's psychological benefits, physiologic benefits, you know, are there any specific benefits that you see besides just like running a hilly race that you would program in for your athletes? Definitely. If any of my athletes are listening to this, like, they all know what hills look like in their training. Yes. So running hills in some form or another, whether you're doing something that is short and very hard and by short, I mean maybe 15 seconds, right? Very short. Or maybe you're doing something that includes very long, kind of moderate graduate, you're you know, running uphill for like half a mile or maybe more, kind of a moderate incline. We haven't even mentioned the different types of inclines. Is it a steep hill? Is it a gradual hill? That sort of thing. But running on hills, research shows has myriad of benefits. It improves your form. It's very hard to run up a hill with bad form, right? So for runners who are working on improving form and efficiency in their biomechanics, running up a hill is one of the best things you can do to kind of force them to run most efficiently in their running form. You can improve your economy. So basically a measure of how much energy we use to run running, you including hills in your training can improve your running economy, not just on hills, but like overall. So you are more efficient. You expend less energy at the same pace or effort. It literally can build strength. Like I said, it does not replace strength training, but it can build strength because as like I said, when you're running up a hill, you are fighting against gravity is kind of an extra layer of challenge to what you're asking your body to do. It has a lot to do with, like I said, you know, kind of that power generation and can help for kind of more muscle fibers in your big muscle groups, right? The big the glutes and the quads and the big muscle groups that we used to run. And of course running hills is mentally challenging, right? There's there's a reason that hills are a metaphor for many things that we talk about in life that are challenging because they are a challenge to run them. And so feeling like you are strong mentally that you can conquer the hill instead of letting it conquer you. That's a huge win for your training in a mental aspect as well. Oh, I love that. And I love that you added that mental challenge because that's one of the things that in our kind of our six steps to grow as runner, like one is mindset. And that's like the mental challenge. And we need to train the mind during training in order to overcome the hard obstacles that we are definitely going to have as you just went this last week in Boston, right? During your race. And I love that you brought in that mental challenge part because for a lot of runners that I work with too, I do like to add in those elements and make sure that they can overcome those challenges in training before they get to the race. So I love that you added that and so improving running form. Yeah, it's really hard. You know, definitely running downhill. It's a little easier, but it's really hard to run uphill and have like the most common form error, which is over striding. Like it's really hard to over stride running uphill. It's almost like virtually impossible. I'm sure someone can probably do it, but it is really hard. So, you know, I see a lot of beginner runners who have shin splints or who have runners knee, my T band syndrome, who are just over striding a lot with their running form. So absolutely adding that incline can really help improve that form. So I love that as well as the definitely the strength aspect to because you are required to recruiting those muscles as you mentioned. So there are these benefits runners of doing hills. So even if you say, I'm never going to run a hilly race or, you know, I live in a flat area and I really never have to encounter hills. Maybe adding in some hill turning into your running may actually improve some other elements of running. So adding a little variety, variety, what do they say, spice a life, right? I wanted to take a quick pause from this episode to talk about a topic that I am extremely passionate about. And that is strength training in order to run so we can improve our performance by running faster or running longer. 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So when is the best time to really start running hills specifically, like whether it's a training cycle or a calendar year, like when do we get intentional in doing some hill training? Yeah. So I mean, it's not a bad idea to think about hills as a foundational part of your training year round. Right. Does that mean that we should be going out and doing monster hill workouts when we're like in an off season? Absolutely not. But this is one of those things where it kind of depends on the philosophy that you ascribe to and how you tend to periodize your training, whether you're more of a kind of linear periodization thing, like one skill at a time. Right. So you build your aerobic base and then you would work on hills and then you would do some right. So instead of doing that, I think we're moving now towards this more kind of reverse linear periodization or like year round, we're kind of keeping some elements of every system that we're trying to work in our training in some aspect. So ideally I love to see runners including hills year round. And this can be as simple as something like you said, like maybe you just choose a hilly route for one of your easy runs every week or every other week. Maybe you're including things like those post run hard up hills four or six times by 15 seconds hard uphill walker jog back to start. Like it really doesn't have to be significant. It can just be just these tiny dose of something that kind of keeps your keeps you efficient, keeps kind of the fire burning, keeps you in shape for running hills. Now obviously going back to that principle of specificity, if you're training for something specifically that requires you to be very efficient on hills, you then need to consider what that means. If you are running a race that contains hills, what is the course profile of this race? Is it rolling hills? Is it just a few massive climbs? Right. Where in the race are they? Is it the beginning when you're super fresh at the end when your legs are about to give out and organizing your training around what that specifically is going to look like for you on race day will help inform how it should show up in your training. So one of the best things I like to do in training for runners who are doing as we're kind of building that progressive overload and moving towards making things more challenging, I think a lot of people, like I said, hills are hard. Hills add a challenge. So let's say you're training for a half marathon and your long runs are getting up in distance and your half marathon isn't super hard, but it's got some rolling hills as we're building up our long runs, let's say for an intermediate runner, we would do something like, let's fill around 10 miles at easy effort. And then maybe next week we do 10 miles with rolling hills. And then a couple of weeks later, we do 10 miles on rolling hills with some work at half marathon pace. So kind of like making sure that we are gradually adding in these different elements of challenge, one of the elements of challenge being hills and not just like assuming that hills don't count. They do count and they add a layer of complexity and we don't, we weren't making sure that we're not like dumping in too many challenge elements all at the same time as we are progressing our training. Okay. All right. So what I'm hearing there is that there's no one answer for when's the best time, but it should be thought about in kind of your yearly plan and be a foundational element that is integrated in some form or fashion throughout your calendar year, depending upon where you are in your reach training cycle. But I love that example that you gave with the half marathon training and how you would kind of program that where, you know, you're covering the 10 flat, then you're doing rolling hills and we're increasing the complexity of running faster on some of those rolling hills with doing some miles at half marathon pace. Okay. So that's definitely beneficial. Would you say because I hear runners doing a lot of, or I guess my first question to you is because as you were saying this, I just wanted to make sure that I'm understanding correctly. You had mentioned twice now about the end of your run, maybe doing like 15 seconds. You know, we're doing some hill repeats where you're going up four times and then coming down. So would you think of that as something like you would do strides at the end of a maybe easy run or maybe at the end of a long run for someone who is pretty well advanced and they're like comfortable at that distance for their long runs? Yeah. So I do think of hard and I call them hard up hills and the people call them hill sprints or hill strides or power up hills or like this. It's the same thing, right? And they are similar to a stride in that they're technically more of a drill more than anything else because they're so short and they do very specific things. They're not necessarily about building up any of the energy systems specifically that you might need like 10, 15 seconds of running. You're pretty much relying on your alactic system. Like it's not right. You're not building aerobic capacity running for 15 seconds. But these types of hard up hills, yes, are kind of like strides after an easy effort run or a long run. If you're more advanced, I don't really have my runners do much after their long runs unless they're like really up there and there's a really specific reason that we're going to do it. But this is a very similar, similar concept to strides. Unlike strides though, when we're doing something like a hard uphill, these very short hard uphill efforts, you don't start with an acceleration. You start with just go, like you're kind of off the blocks as if you were a sprinter. You start power from the first step and you kind of start strong and stay strong throughout the whole 15 or even 20 seconds depending on how long the specific rep is for you. And then typically you would walk or jog return to start. We want things like this, these drill type, I don't even saw them workouts, things like strides or these hard up hills. You want to be fully recovered in between because the point of doing things like strides or a poster on hills is not to generate, is not to create fatigue. It's to work the systems efficiently and to do that you want to be recovered. So taking a minute, 90 seconds between each rep is preferred in most cases. So ideally what we're going to do is progress in those. You're going to start kind of medium strong. I like to do when I do my poster on, I always do them by my right outside my house because I live on a hill. And I do them and I start at this one very specific storm great. And I know that my first one I'm going to get to that the second driveway and then I'm going to get past the second driveway and then I'm going to get to the bush. So if ideally you're just kind of extending and like working a little bit harder every single time because ideally the last one that you should do with the strongest hardest one that you do, but you're covering the same, you're more distance in the same amount of time. That's how, for me that's how I know that I'm executing my poster on hard up hills correctly. But yeah, it is more like, it is a drill more like strides and it's, it's incredibly, this amazingly powerful little package of benefits in a tiny little work. Like it's what seven, maybe 10 total minutes for doing six by 20 seconds with full rest in between. Like you can get so many benefits from this tiny little thing that you're doing maybe once or twice a week. Right. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. And really your main goal, your rationale is, is more to kind of work on form, right? And prove form like you would, more like a form drill like strides. It's just a little different form that you're working on, but I love how you clarified kind of run out gradually accelerating up. You're just like hitting, hitting it hard, right? Like off the blocks and just trying to get up that hill. Okay. So that's kind of one form of how to do hill runs or hill training. You know, how, what are some other forms? You know, how do we train for hill runs or how do we really like implement this type of training? Yeah. So like I kind of mentioned rolling hills and rolling hills, people get really confused like, no, tell me exactly what that means and how many feet I should, like look, I say the best advice for people who have hills available to them in their backyard, run the hills that are available to you in your backyard. Right. As you expand the routes you have available to you depending on where you live, you know, probably able to put together routes that are more hilly or less hilly routes that have probably that one giant climb runs that are kind of like, like I said, rollers literally rolling up and down, you know, kind of like a, let me say I'm doing with my finger here like rolling waves, right? And all hills, all hills are good. There's a thing as a bad hill. All hills are beneficial. I would caution people to think that steeper hills are, are better somehow though steep hills are very challenging depending on the steepness of the hill and how, how fit you are. It could be that you've chosen to run hills that are so steep, it actually is going to be working against you because at a certain like, you know, incline, right, if I'm trying to run up a 15% grade hill, I'm not going to be able to do that very efficiently and I'm not going to be able to go very fast because that's very, very challenging to run up a hill of that, of that steepness. And so, you know, I think it's, as runners, we tend to think the harder the better, the more complex, the more intense, the more bad ass, the better. And that's not necessarily the case, right? So kind of, you know, think about, you don't have to go find the hardest hill in your neighborhood and go run up and down that. But any hills that you have available will do for you. Rolling hills, you want to get that up and the downhill. We've kind of touched on downhill requires a slightly different way of running a lot of that downhill running is going to involve your quadriceps, a lot of shock absorption and braking force and eccentric contractions and running downhill efficiently is its own set of skills that you need to practice if you're raised can raise a lot of downhills. But like I said, kind of the best way to start incorporating hills in your training is to simply start including a route or roots in your regular runs, your easy effort runs that contain hills. Now the biggest kind of question I get about this is that, well, if I'm going on an easy run and I run up a hill, I'm not in my easy zone anymore. And this is a really common, and for me, like the neighborhood I live in, yeah, there are some hills that I still can't run and stay in my easy effort zone. They're not insignificant hills. For those runners, they really have, you know, kind of two, we have two options here. So if we're on it, an easy effort run and we're trying and we're running a hilly route and we're trying to stay in our easy effort zone, what do we do? Should we walk? Maybe that's not a bad idea, right? Over time as your aerobic fitness increases, you will likely be able to run more of that hill before needing to take a walk break. Additionally, if you are running up this hill and you find that your heart rate, you know, your effort is maybe climbing into that mid moderate zone, right? Like you're working, but it's not, you're not crazy sky high, right? You're not at 5K effort, not maxing yourself out. And you're only there for a minute or two. And then you're recovering, you know, you hit the crest, maybe it's flat or maybe it's downhill. And then you're recovering really well afterwards. Your heart rate drops, your effort drops. You're good to go. That's fine, right? Because part of becoming more efficient on the hill is running the hill. What I get really kind of ookie about is runners who said, well, you told me to run hills, but now all my easy runs are hard, right? And then I look at their data and they're running their hill, they're all in like zone four, right? So they're just like, you know, sprinting up these hills. It's okay to slow down on the hills. And it's okay, it's remembered that everything has to be in balance. So there is going to be some trade off. If you choose to include hills in your route and you're building that fitness on hills, you're going to need to slow down. And that's completely okay. Some hills you may have to walk. That's completely okay. Over time, what I said, we're going to improve that economy on the hills and the flats. We're going to improve that strength. We're going to improve our ability to run hills more efficiently so that in the long term, what we're doing is making ourselves into better runners on the hills and on flats as well. So the hills will get easier over time where our effort level and our heart rate, if we're doing heart rate training or kind of keying into that metric, won't spike as high, right? Ideally, that is the goal. Yeah. Oh, and I think the frustration for a lot of runners is that this takes longer than they want, you know, and then some, I sometimes we get in this kind of self-defeating loop, like, oh, that hill is hard and it's always hard. And no matter what I do, I can never seem, you know, to master that hill and then we get really kind of down on ourselves about it. And I think it's really important to remember that we're talking about gaining fitness, improving economy, like all these kinds of sciency, coachee buzzwords is we're literally talking about your body changing on a cellular level on an atomic level. And that doesn't happen overnight. Your mitochondria don't just appear. They have to be built. And that takes time. So being consistent and just continuing to incorporate these types of things in your training, like hills, are just going to make you more efficient in the long run. It's not overnight, but it will happen. Mm hmm. Yeah. And I do the same as far as, you know, making sure that my runners do probably slow down on the hill. So they're not expending extreme effort levels, especially. I guess I'd be remiss to not mention this, the physical therapist in me, if you are recovering from an injury still or have a little niggle. And especially if it's your Achilles, you know, that is one injury that tends to not do well running uphill just because of the reflection, mobility in your ankle and the amount of power that the Achilles is going to generate as you go up that hill. So just kind of making sure that, you know, you are keeping it in your effort level, that it should be from not only like an aerobic training standpoint, but from a tendon loading standpoint and allow your body to adapt to the demands of hill training. So if this is the first time you're like, listen to this episode, you're like, Coach Elizabeth, awesome hills, let's do it. Right? Mind over matter. I'm going to do this hill. So definitely progression is key in making sure that you are implementing these in the right effort level as well. So I like that you kind of mentioned that before. And I like how you talked about kind of starting with just integrating some rolling hills into, you know, some of the easy runs. I hope you are enjoying this episode and it is providing value for you. I wanted to take a brief moment to share a story of a real runner like you who is struggling with a common problem that you may be facing. Here is one of our athletes who got the guidance, support and accountability from our healthy runner coaching team to get clarity and structure on the six steps to growing as a runner with personalized strength, nutrition and run plans. I hope their story inspires you that there is hope to either get over your running injury or to continue getting faster or running longer so you can continue to get in those mental clearing miles and enjoy your running journey again. Here is their inspiring story. Hi, my name is Emily. I currently live in Copenhagen, Denmark. I have been working with Coach Whitney in the healthy runner coaching community for about 18 months. When I was working with Coach Whitney, I ran two half marathons, two full marathons and I am currently training for my third full marathon with her. I started working with her not because of injury but because I was feeling aimless in my running. I had just had a marathon canceled in spring of 2021 due to COVID and didn't know where to go with that. I started a podcast by Dwayne about coaching and run plans and was intrigued. However, I had a lot of doubts about doing it. I always thought run coaching was for individuals who were fast looking for BQs or different things like that, not a middle of a pack runner like me. But I quickly found out that run coaching is good for anybody and the benefits that it has given me go beyond the PRs that I have had in races but are setting me up to keep running. I have been a runner for 11 years and have ran marathons and half marathons previously to working with Coach Whitney. In each of the cycles I either get burned out, injured or run the race and then I take a long break after and have to build from zero. With the coaching community I have learned the importance of consistency in my training, not only during training cycles but also outside of training cycles. I have learned the importance of strength training as a busy mom of two young boys. I frequently find time for my running but not so much for my strength training and since making strength training a priority of my week I found injuries don't happen as much or when I do have pains I'm able to get help from Whitney or Duane right away and I have a physical therapist here in Denmark that I also work with who follows many of the same beliefs that the healthy runner coaching community follows. I always reach out to Whitney and Duane and then we'll go see my physical therapist here. I think the biggest thing that I have taken away from my coaching experience is confidence in my running and confidence in knowing and trusting process of a training cycle. I just can't recommend enough working with somebody in the healthy running community and investing in yourself to become the best runner that you can be with where you are currently at which is I think the best thing that these coaches do is they look at where you're at and they build those plans and they build on those plans each training cycle so that you can keep getting better in each training cycle has its own specific purpose. So that is something I have enjoyed with this process and highly recommend if you are thinking about coaching on and doubting it or wondering should I do this should I invest in myself please make that investment it's probably one of the best investments you can make if you want to continue running as a lifelong runner. I hope sharing that story inspired you and provided you some hope. If you want the one on one structure accountability and support from our healthy runner coaching team of experts check out the behind the scenes video tour of our signature coaching program you just heard about including other stories from runners who are just like you and were struggling with the same sticking points before they signed up for our program just head to learn.spark healthy runner.com to learn more and book your strategy call with me today. Now let's get back into this episode. Do you also include hill training as its own separate workout for your athletes where it's you know like let's say you're doing someone's plan and they have maybe one day of like speed work whether it is a temple run or maybe an interval run you know do you have where some athletes they're just doing like hill repeats as what are their quote unquote quality which is always tough to repeat on that like every runner's quality right but let's say our harder effort run during a week do you ever kind of separate that out where it is its own harder effort run. Yeah and hills themselves can be a workout like you can structure a whole workout around hill repeats and I think it's really fun we talk about you know there's a lot of different ways we can describe hard running right like we called a tempo run and we called a latte threshold run and we call this or that so yes you can have a running workout that is put together where it simply involves you running up and down a hill you can warm up run up and down a hill a bunch of times and then that's the entire workout. This is basically when this is programmed I typically this type of workout is in most cases going to be included for me more that skill building faves for my runners if we're doing kind of these maybe like 30 60 or 90 seconds you know running up a moderate incline and maybe 5k effort and not pace because 5k pace on and up hills very different from 5k pace on a flat hill 5k effort this would be more like an extended version of hard up hills basically hard up hills are basically like a 9.5 effort out of 10 this would be more like an 8 out of 10 effort and then of course if we're getting really specific and we're running a hilly race it may be beneficial to do specific race pace goal pace workouts on hills assuming that the effort zone is correct and the race like it all makes sense that we're trying to do and there's this is like this is the fun part because it's like there's so many ways one can put together a training schedule because I can imagine a million different ways in which hill repeats can be beneficial for runners whether they're staying for you know 3k or a marathon but just kind of the volume and what that workout looks like it's going to be a little bit different I would say typically we for me personally whenever I hear repeats right we're typically talking about slightly higher intensity like I do you know sometimes I'll introduce marathon pace repeats you know marathon pace work in mile repeats to my runners but most cases and we're doing like shorter repeats that's a pretty high intensity I would never ask my runners to run uphill for 2 miles that would be crazy first of all where they even find that hill right and side of like but you know so I think by definition of what hills are you know we're probably limited to a couple minutes maybe a half a mile for most people if you are lucky lucky to have an uphill mile available to you tell your coach I'm sure they'll be ecstatic to work that into your schedule if it makes sense but yes it is entirely possible to devise a workout for a specific runner based on what they're training for that is simply running up and down a hill in a specific effort zone for a specific duration or distance based on what they're trying to accomplish but again I think it's one of those things where people get really kind of antsy on hills with pace and effort like I said your 5k pace on a hill is not going to be the same thing thing as your 5k pace on the flat and so what I see a lot of runners doing is a huge mistake a lot of runners make when they're including hills in their workouts is that they try to run the same pace up the hill what did I say hills are hard hills add a layer of challenge you're fighting against gravity so what do you automatically do I'm going to running up a hill at that same pace you are running you are rationing up that intensity sometimes a lot and if I have a runner let's say I want them to be around lactate threshold effort one hour race pace effort right further I'm just putting this you know pulling this out of my hat say for this specific hill workout and they run their one hour like let's say there are 10 one hour 10k runner right so their 10k pace slash effort is their lactate threshold pace but they look at this hill and they say I'm just going to run 10k pace up this hill what are they doing they're running harder than lactate threshold effort right so it's very important when we're running hills unless you're in very late stages of your race specific training and your coaches guiding you on like specific splits as we target different inclines right in most cases running hills is going to be an effort based endeavor instead of a pace based endeavor and it's okay if you're a little bit slower because I give that you your efforts going to be in the right place and that's really the only thing that matters yeah and that's definitely taking me a while to finally be okay with that because going from my house I'm like one of those runners who pretty much like I like the same route I'm structured I like it out back and I know exactly you know the distances right from my house that's you know every half mile I know exactly where I'm going to turn around even if I didn't have my watch with me but you know there's this half mile stretch that is always always in the middle of my temple or my threshold pace run so I have to go up it like there's no getting around it it happens and it took me a while to really learn that because I definitely used the red line because I was locked in like Shepherd Porty's my pace like I'm gonna hit this like mind over matter you know and I was definitely red line and I was jumping way over like where I needed to be for that specific run and I finally like again as we evolve as we grow as we learn you know I finally became okay with okay I know this mile I don't care what it shows up in my you know Strava and my Garmin like yeah it's gonna look like I just like sucked at this mile until you look at my elevation right and you know just go on that effort level so I think that's a very important point that you bring in that the expectations and to make sure that you're keeping you know this hill run we'll call it to its intended goal in your training plan whether it's an easy run whether it's a threshold run whether it's your long run and now you're you know trying to keep it within a certain effort level so thank you for for bringing that up is there any other specific things in terms of implementing hill training that usually share with your runners that you'd like to share? I mean I think you know there I think there are probably two camps of runners right the runners who run a ton of hills because they have no choice right and then they're the runners who don't who have to seek out hills right and I would say you know for all of this advice applies for runners who run hills all the time you probably just don't notice it as much although you obviously hills are always hard right if you if you are a person who tends to run very very hilly roots you may not notice these things as much because you are more efficient and adapted and economical on the hills right but that doesn't mean that you still can't use hills very strategically in your training and so you know I mentioned before about if you're signing up for a race that has hills learn what that course profile is and if you can I mean it sounds it sounds nitpicky but like people are always looking at you know looking for that kind of like what can give me the extra edge and like well besides spending a lot of time in your easy zone and making sure you're getting up sleep at night if you really want to prepare as specifically as possible for the race that you're doing understand the demands of the course right and where like I said where those hills are so if you're running the New York City Marathon for example and you know they're gonna be running over bridges just fixed incline I think the bridges are about 4% incline and you're gonna have all these like half mile climbs and half mile descents at 4% well you dang sure better have hills like that in your training maybe even over prepare just a little bit so you know don't you know we have all this this information to us now about course profiles and we can map things out on map my run and almost every race will have a really detailed elevation profile available to you on their website I always like to also map it out just so I know what I'm seeing right that's the best way to prepare is to prepare specifically for the race that you have so don't you're not showing off me like I didn't know there were hills you should have known right but I also want you to say I also want to say this for runners there's no reason you can't run a really fast race on a hilly course but if the only thing you care about is running as fast as possible running a flat course is gonna be your best bet right so hills are gonna make you faster but running hills and training and then racing on a flat course is gonna make you fastest right so I think sometimes when we think but I trained I trained so hard for that race I ran so many hills I did I did strength training get all things I was supposed to do why didn't I hit my goal time like well you had a thousand feet of elevation gain in that race like what did you expect was gonna happen right if you if the only thing we were chasing here was a time you choose a different race right so you know understand what you're getting yourself into and what your goals are as it relates to what you're training for yeah no I think that's a that's a great point and you mentioned before downhill running and how that is somewhat a little bit of a different animal and obviously you had to consider a lot of the downhill in your Boston training you know do you have any tips for downhill running or things that you've learned along the way yeah uh over prepare I thought I'd over prepared for Boston I live in a very hilly area I love running downhill I really do I can easily lose 300 feet in a mile and a half leaving my house like I was ready um I probably didn't do as much eccentric strength work as I should have and that was probably on me east so we talked about like oh running hills will make you better running hills what can also help make you better running hills strength training strength training helps make everything better but especially running up and downhill you essentially want to bulletproof your legs right but running downhill like I said yeah takes a different kind of toll you might think running downhill is amazing I get this gravity assist I can run so much faster much lower effort but like I said when you were running downhill and I'm sure you can speak to this more as a physical therapist your quads are working overtime to stabilize you absorb those shocks and they're doing it in an east center kind of muscle lengthening position so they're being lengthened under load. East-centric muscle contractions are really interesting and because they actually require fewer muscle fibers to take place but the east-centric contractions themselves are more damaging than concentric contractions so it's very easy if you haven't prepared correctly to do something like we call trashing your quads which is when you run a ton of downhill and then you basically burn out your quads and then the whole system kind of falls apart because one of your major muscle groups is not really cooperating and your legs won't work as efficiently on flats or up hills or down hills as you want them to which is famously happens to a ton of people of boston including me and kip chowgai so he and I have that in common but yeah if you have down hills in your race you need to practice downhill running and if you are choosing to run something with those mount revel races where you were like dropping off the side of a mountain you need to practice what it's like to lose that much elevation on your runs it is uh it's a piece of cake until it's not a piece of cake anymore and then you realize you can barely move forward so um any respect the hills prepare for them like this isn't this isn't magic right it's just science it's just our bodies and us trying to do the best we can with our bodies um but i cannot speak highly enough about the benefits of strength training to repair you to run hills efficiently in your training and your racing yeah and i think that kind of speaks to like how do you get stronger at running hills um definitely strength training and i like that you brought up the point about eccentric muscle contractions and for those that are doing your strength training where you know again you're doing more of every single exercise is bootcamp style like you know throw a kettle bell around as fast as possible and you're not controlling anything especially not controlling anything on one leg like you do when you run then you're definitely doing a disservice if you do want to master downhill running um and really work on the control of the quads as Elizabeth said at controlling your knee coming forward um yeah that that's strength training and it does take time it takes weeks it takes months it takes years to build up the strength um eccentrically as well as the load to your tendons to prevent getting patellar tendonopathy um it band syndrome or even Achilles as we had mentioned before because those downhill running is also going to load the tendons more as well so not only will the eccentric you know muscle strengthening exercises help from a performance standpoint where your muscles won't become as fatigued and trashed but they'll also be protective for your tendons so your tendons can withstand the load that you need for downhill training and downhill racing so yeah some great great benefits um there and i always like to tell my runners too of just you know avoiding the urge to lean back and try to break right and try to slow down because you think either it will help you or you're going to keep your peace or your heart rate right where it is um you know i honestly am a firm believer of like i'd almost rather a heart rate stay where it is and just increase your cadence and your turnover time so i always like tell my runners like pretend we're like the road runner like really try to take that cadence like the next level and that's really what you should be focusing on going downhill is your form trying to stay relaxed in the upper body trying to let that arm swing go you know nice and efficiently and just get that leg turnover like just turn those legs over try to tick your ball tick your ball tick your ball like as soon as your foot hits the ground boom boom pop it up so you're not slowing down and breaking and using that much force of the quads but there is this balance right and you know i've never done boston specific training and i've never un-bosted but people talk about like trying to slow down a little bit especially in the beginning right and those like first five miles you know not running too fast because you know that's one thing too so they're like there's this balance is you don't want to like just like you know sprint down these hills and get that turnover but at the same time you want to try to conserve energy and you don't want to break you don't want to like the breaking forces so your muscles are being like overutilized i don't know if that makes sense or you have anything to add to that from your personal experience yeah it's funny when you said you know it's it's basically impossible to overstride when you're running uphill and it's very hard not to overstride if you're not paying attention when you're running downhill and something i hear from a lot of runners when they're when they're first learning to run downhill is that they feel like they're they lean back because they're afraid it feels like they're going to fall over or fall forward or lose their balance right so for me that's a sign that some if if a runner comes to me and says i feel unstable in any position right that's a sign to me that something is unstable right something is not strong enough to do its job so you know i think when we talk about the benefits of strength training we have to make sure that we are doing like our our whole body and our core work and we're making our whole body stable on these single legs because if you can harness the power of downhill running it can be a huge benefit to you as a runner and as a racer um the other thing i would say though is that i would caution my runners especially if they if they are running hill running races that have a significant downhill don't run downhill at a pace you can't run on a flat surface because i've seen runners say oh there was a huge downhill so i took advantage of it and i just ran as fast as i could look how fast i ran let's say we're gonna pull numbers out of our hat let's say that they were trying to hit eight-minute pace for whatever this race was and they ran like 650 pace down this hill um like that's not even your mind that's faster than your mind what business do you have running that pace downhill if you couldn't even run it so because we talk about you know obviously if we we kind of get the gravity assist in that it it takes less effort to run downhill but there is this used shaped curve of we can overdo it right because we want to make sure that we're not over expending energy at any point during our race but also that the the simple act of running that hard downhill we just talked about with your quads and the eccentric contractions you are incurring a whole bunch of damage and i hope that downhill was a sprint to the finish because otherwise it's probably going to come back and bite you in the butt yes yes absolutely i couldn't agree more and as we kind of come down you know the final stretch here if you can change one thing about the misconception about hill training what would that be um i would actually something that you said earlier that hills get easier that you don't necessarily get easier right you just get better at running them running them and i think that's really something that as runners i'll never forget this the running for a couple years my mom asked me she's not a runner and she asked me she's like so like when you do these races is it does it get easier and i was like no it doesn't get easier it's still hard right i just get better at dealing with how hard it is and i get better at running so i can run it faster um so you know if you're in this place where you're like you have been running hills for 10 years and they're still hard that's normal hills are always going to be hard doesn't mean you shouldn't do them though right and that it is part of the training right and that's why we do them is to allow that body to adapt so just kind of recap in here um you know thank you for sharing this information in which we really kind of did a little deep dive on hill training and what hill training is why we would consider kind of adding hill training in and you talked about those benefits and form economy strength the mental challenge and benefits that it provides um we talked about you know when is the best time in our training week we talked kind of race schedule like when we should be adding these hills in um and gave some you know specific examples of how to kind of program in um some of those hill efforts and then definitely talked about kind of um how to strengthen our legs right for like hill training and what types of strength exercises we should be adding in into our training um so this was fantastic as i knew it would be and you know thank you for providing your expertise and it was certainly great to catch up and you know where can our healthy runner community uh connect with you Elizabeth they want to learn more about you and what are you explaining thank you for having me you know i just had a second misconception that i wanted to bring up um there is there is a misconception among some people that if you run hills you don't need to strength train and that is simply not true so if you ever had a coach or another runner tell you that you don't need strength training because you run plenty of hills they're wrong i don't care how credentialed they are they're wrong studies have shown strength training makes everything better and it prepares you to run hills even better too so yes it's my second misconception um where can you find me uh at running explained uh i am on instagram i have a website i have a podcast a running explained podcast i hang out on instagram most days and i have a ton of free content available for runners of all experience levels whether you are brand new or been running for years and years and years there's something for you i guarantee you're gonna learn something because i learned something new every single day about running and if you're looking for more kind of specific stuff i have a ton of other um more in-depth content group training master classes uh i call training plus programs so something for everyone i love it and i i love your second misconception because that was definitely a pet peeve of mine when i started running and i heard other runners say that that you know they do hills for like strength training and it makes them stronger and that's all they need to do um and just taking like the principles of specificity of training principles and like really trying to tie that into and i'm like no but it's not the same as strength training so i love that you brought that up because we didn't mention that earlier um and guys i knew you're gonna love this episode so if you want to learn more about Elizabeth check out all the links that i have for you in the show notes she's got amazing content um i love her content i love her podcast and if you want to hear about kind of the feet behind the curtain i mentioned earlier check out episode 148 on the healthy runner podcast and thank you so much for all of you listening uh whether you're listening during the run right now hopefully you're crushing your run maybe you're crushing some hills and you're learning something along the way or if you're watching the video version this in the spark healthy runner youtube channel i appreciate all of you as always runners let's maintain a strong mind a strong body and let's just keep on running until next time thank you as always for listening to the healthy runner podcast where we help you get stronger run faster and enjoy lifelong injury free running if you found this content valuable here's five ways we can help you grow as a runner for free one grab a free copy of our six steps to growing as a runner framework at learn dot spark healthy runner dot com forward slash grow two follow our instagram page at spark healthy runner three join our free group by searching healthy runner in facebook four subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube dot com forward slash spark healthy runner five leave us a five star review so we can gain access to more experts in the running field and bring those lessons and trainings back here right to you don't forget hit the subscribe button on apple podcast or the follow button on spotify so you don't miss the next episode of healthy runner so you can maintain a strong mind a strong body and just keep running lastly if you've been struggling with the constant injury cycle not eating the right foods for running or not getting faster as a runner and you are ready to invest in becoming a lifelong injury free runner head to spark healthy runner dot com forward slash coaching to apply for a one-on-one signature coaching program thank you again i really truly mean it from the bottom of my heart that i appreciate you for listening and sharing this podcast with a running friend who can use the help now go and crush your run today see you next week you ♪♪♪