Hills

Hills. They often seem like the devil's work when you are toward the end of a practice or race and you discover that you now have to make your way up an incline, no matter how steep it is. Those few degrees of incline can seem like they require 20 times more effort to travel the same distance than on flat ground, and it does require a little more energy. Hills can burn your calf muscles and make your lungs gasp for breath. But there are a few tricks I have learned from various coaches that I am going to share with you. But be warned, they do not magically make running hills suddenly feel like floating on a cloud; they just offer a new way to think about and take on hills. 

My coach has told us for years to "Maintain our effort up the hills, and push past people on the way down." This means that one should attempt to keep using the same amount of energy up a hill as they have been throughout the race, and not try to keep the same pace, because attempting to maintain the same speed up a hill as on flat ground will zap all of your energy. By maintaining effort, you are essentially working the same amount, and thereby slowing down a little, but you then have more energy at the top of the hill that you can use to take on the people ahead of you who are now exhausted. 

To put it another way, when I went to a camp at Wartburg College in Iowa during the summer before my freshman and sophomore years, the head coach of the successful men and women’s Cross Country teams, Steve Johnson, gave us the short quote “crest don’t rest.” This basically is saying that at the top of a hill, or the crest, you should push through toward the bottom and use the momentum of the hill, and not rest because you wasted so much energy chugging up the hill that now you have to slug down it to regain your energy for a few seconds. So just remember that hills are hard for everyone and as long as you don’t empty your tank on the way up, you should use the decline to your advantage to take on the people ahead of you. Just because the hill is behind you, doesn’t mean you are done with the race, you have just completed one of the many obstacles on the cross country course.