Like All Runners, I Used to Hate Hill Workouts. Then I Finally Figured Out How to Make Them Work for Me.
My current hometown of Easton, Pennsylvania, where Runner’s World has its headquarters, is a hill workout haven where the elevation can, on average, change by 100 feet per mile (within 2 miles, the maximum elevation change is 653 feet).
And while many of my coworkers have been taking advantage of this natural resistance in their training, I’ve worked very hard to perfect flat routes around town that avoid these hills. I will hike up a 3,000-foot mountain without a single complaint, but hills in the middle of my running workout? Mood killers. Life suckers. Spoilsports.
And yes, I know that the saying about hills is true—they do strengthen hips, legs, and core muscles, and help improve running form due to the increased cadence and aggressive knee drive they require. For those reasons alone—as is often the case—my stubbornness has been sabotaging me for years.
But hills are just so hard. They would elevate my heart rate to a point from which I could never recover and make me hate the rest of my run. Most of my past training plans called for hill repeats at some point, but since I historically checked off my workouts on a printed plan attached to my fridge, I used to simply cross out the word “hill” and just cover the mileage for that day.
Until I couldn’t. During my current training for the SeaWheeze Half Marathon in August, I am using Runna, a training app integrated with Strava, which I programmed to create a sub-2 plan, doing four runs (and one strength session) per week. The app imports my workouts to Strava and Garmin, and at the push of a button, my voice coach is ready to guide me through the day’s training. I pretty much gave the coach authority over my life. I follow the audio cues to a T. The voice in my ears is my running god.
And so when the app told me to run hill repeats, I sighed by default. But because I couldn’t just cross out the “hill” part of the workout on my watch, I felt like my run wouldn’t count if I didn’t do what I was asked. And since the workout was only a 5K overall, I figured it couldn’t possibly be that awful. During the prescribed 1K warmup, I jogged to the foot of a half-mile, 10-percent grade hill, where the plan was to do seven repeats of hard uphill runs for 1 minute, then walk for 30 seconds, followed by a jog back down.
The 30-second recovery walk was a silver lining; surely I could run hard for a minute if that meant that I could take a break right after. And so when my voice coach said, “Warmup complete. Run!” I did.
I am not gonna lie: by the last repeat, I was pretty sure I hit a new max heart rate and outperformed my VO2 max test from just a few weeks ago, but I completed the workout. And then I did it again the week after, and the week after that.
And by week four, not only did the hill repeats start to feel easier—so did all my other runs. I no longer needed to stop and catch a breath at the top of the one inevitable hill on my five-mile loop. I ran my intervals (on a flat trail) above the prescribed pace—and still felt like I could have run harder at the end. My long run was a breeze.
I know that, for me, accountability is the best way to override my brain’s natural resistance to quite literally anything I don’t feel like doing. And somehow, the voice coach prevents me from cheating on my workouts. The consistent cues in my ears break up the monotony of the workout, keeping me engaged and expecting a change without having to check the watch or count down the seconds for each interval myself.
Obviously, I’ll be importing all workouts into my watch from now on.
Pavlína Černá, an RRCA-certified run coach and cycling enthusiast, has been with Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics since August 2021. When she doesn’t edit, she writes; when she doesn’t write, she reads or translates. In whatever time she has left, you can find her outside running, riding, or roller-skating to the beat of one of the many audiobooks on her TBL list.