Hill Repeats, repeats, repeats

Today's training run was 4 x 1000 metre hill repeats. I think I hate hills, no strike that, I know I hate hills - and I live in Ramat Bet Shemesh - home of the hill. There pretty much is no flat stretch here, just sloping declines, followed by the inevitable incline - and many, rolling hills, and that's just the sidewalks! Seriously, we pretty much do hill work all the time, but today I did the 1,000 metre repeats on a pretty steady climb and while I initially went out too fast - I steadied the pace and worked it out.

I was happy to see that according to my trusty Garmin, (which I absolutely love!), my times on the hill repeats have improved substantially over the past 3 weeks. Where as my first set of repeats, 3 weeks ago I had an average time of 7:06, today I did 6:40. Improvement, yeah! It's hard to see your improvement on a daily, or weekly basis, but this showed me that all the hard work is paying off.

There are but 3 runs left until the HM next week - and it's time to taper off. Maybe a mid-long on friday and two shorter runs following that. It's hard to believe that all this intense training is going to come to an end - and I wonder how that will feel. Running for fun... remember that?

Opening Musings

While I'm not exactly new to running - blogging, well that's a horse of a different colour... I'd like this blog to be a place where the odd ramblings in my head find new life instead of simply bouncing around and around until they wear themselves out...

I've only just gone back to running this past six months after having an eight year break!! I've traded in the treadmill for the great outdoors, and am training for my first HM on March 18th.

It's amazing how 'once a runner, always a runner' worked for me. After such a long break, you would have thought that it would take a long time to get back up to speed. But here I am, finished 7 of 9 weeks of training before the half - and I'm ready. Friday's run was 22 km and I recovered well enough to run 11.25 km recovery Saturday night. Today I feel great.

Only 5 training runs before the big event - and I'll admit to being scared! Yikes!

I keep scanning all the blogs and websites for tips and personal stories of HM runs... I'm the kind of person that likes to know what's coming up - no suprises for me, please! So - I'll keep surfing the web and training and see how it goes...