Get Stronger With Short Hill Sprints
When your training schedule calls for “Short Hill Sprints” keep the following points in mind:
The purpose is to build leg strength and cardiovascular power. Effort level uphill is 100%. Hopefully the pace ends up being around your current best 400m pace. If peak pace is only around 5K pace, you are not running fast enough.
Use a run-mapping site like onthegomap.com to find a hill that will take around 20-25 seconds to climb. 100-150 meters at 8% grade works well. Anything below 6% grade is probably too easy. Here’s a good example of what you’re looking for: https://onthegomap.com/s/8d61eft0.
On the way up, get on the balls of your feet and off the heels. Lean the whole body slightly forward (don’t just bend at the waist) and push forcefully into the ground to keep momentum.
Take a very slow jog or shuffle back down the hill. Focus on keeping the hips high and not overstriding.
If possible, find a hill where you can safely run on the road. Since you will be running at max effort, you want to avoid uneven sidewalks that force you to slow down.
Try to place the hill sprints in the middle of your workout, with steady running (around marathon pace) before and after to hit the day’s total mileage target.
Don’t worry about timing your reps. Hopefully you are running fast enough that trying to mess with your watch will feel awkward. If you want to lap at the bottom and just glace at the rep time at the top, that works. An easy way to track your times is to create a Strava segment for your hill. That way you can let the watch run during the workout and when you get home, all your reps will be recorded for you.
If fatigue is building and your reps are getting dramatically slower, spend 3-5 minutes of steady running before resuming the reps. Don’t just stand around to recover. That breaks the rhythm of the workout.
You can review one of my recent hill sprint workouts here. You’ll see that the workout called for six reps placed in the middle of a six mile run. The cruise pace to the hills and back was around 6:50-7:10. Peak pace up the hill was 3:40 pace with each rep getting close to 4:00 pace. That pace would feel awful on a flat road because the impact forces would be too high. But on a steep hill, the legs feel fine. The downhill shuffle was 12:00 pace which is barely lifting the feet and floating down the hill. Cadence on the cruise portions of the workout was a steady 179 but you’ll see that the cadence increases into the high 220s during the hill sprints. Your workout data should show similar spikes in cadence during the sprints.
This particular hill is 120 meters long with an average grade of 9.5%. I like this hill because the grade is steepest at the top and traffic is light enough that I can sprint in the road and use the sidewalk for the recovery shuffle down.