Hills are paying off

True to my word, I've been hitting the hills hard ever since last week and it's really reaping benefits. The first few days were tough and I was very sore afterwards even though the whole workout was only 5k or so. Supercompensation kicked in though and I soon reached the point where doing an hour of hill reps wasn't an issue.

To show myself how far I've come, I did a hill test on the treadmill at work this evening. The protocol is quite similar to what I understand a lab based VO2 max test to be: starting at 9kph and 0% incline, I increase the speed every 15 seconds and the incline every 0.5 km. So it's a very easy workout for about 15 minutes and then it rapidly gets tough til by the end it's really a question of how much longer I'm willing to hurt for. I did it for the first time last week, enduring 4 km/18:00 of torture (it's actually quite fun though:D). At that point (4% incline, 16.3kph), I was well over my threshold and could perhaps have maintained it for a bit longer, but definitely couldn't handle increasing the speed any more. So I was very pleased today when I got to the 4k mark barely feeling it, and lasted another 3:00/600 m before hitting stop. At that point, the speed was 17.4kph and the incline 4.5%, so I think it's a massive improvement in fitness in a very short space of time. I'm looking forward to the Aths Vic 10 miler on Saturday to see what it translates into in a race (hoping for sub 60).

I also had an awesome time at Lake Mountain on Sunday. Dad and I went up to take advantage of the 15 cm of snow/mud that apparently counts as 'very good' these days and in between trying to avoid the rocks that were sticking out of the trails, I managed to do 5 reps up the Royston road trail. It's 1.8k long and a killer (3 minutes to go down, 12 minutes to go up) but I felt great and a heck of a lot stronger than last year, where even one go up murdered me.