First Hill Workout Week and Rest of Year Plan

Started the week with 90 minutes of soccer. I'm just about to the point where I can run as much as needed for the whole 90 and still be able to function. Just about. But not quite. Last 10 minutes or so included a lot of tired passes to no one in particular. Afterward felt pretty good though. Tired, but not exhausted. I count these games as 5 miles of fartlek, but it sure seems like more.

Monday morning I did what has become my standard long run for the last month: 2 miles mostly somewhat down then a bit somewhat up, 0.65 mile hill with one down section and one flat section but mostly steeply up, 0.6 mile gradually down, 0.65 down, 0.6 flat back to start of hill, then the initial 2 miles back. That's 6.5 total. I can cut the hill loop down a bit and fashion this into 7 or 7.5, etc. Eventually doing 2 complete hill loops for 9 total.

Tuesday I did a 40-minute recovery run on the treadmill. 1% elevation. Started at 5.0 mph and increased 0.1 mph every minute until my HR was at 135. That took 20 minutes so I was then at 7.0. Held that for 5 minutes. At that point HR was up to 139 so went down to 6.9. Held that for the remaining 15 minutes. HR went back to 135 for most but up to 137 for the final few minutes.
Covered 4.25 miles in the 40 minutes. Interestingly that's a 9:24.7 average pace. Based on my recent 1-mile race result and using the McMillan calculator the high (slow) end of my recovery run pace should be 9:25. Nice. A month and a half ago or so I did this same run and ended up around 6.0 mph for a 135 HR. Good progress then.

Today I did my first hill workout. I used a 150 meter hill that is 80 meters up, 40 meters flat, and 30 meters up. The up parts are pretty steep. To get back to the bottom it's about 0.3 mile that goes flat for something less then 0.1 mile, down for something less then 0.1 mile, and gradually down for the rest. So the whole loop is about 0.4 mile. I did 4 loops of flat-footed high-knees on the steep sections of the hill with recovery jogging on the loop. Along with warm up and cool down recovery pace jogging. By the top of each of the 80-meter initial sections the knees weren't so high. Same with the top of the 30-meter section after a brief respite on the 40-meter flat. So it seemed about right for the first time out.

The plan for the next few weeks is to do 2 hill sessions a week like this...

High knees both days
High knees one day / Hill bounding one day
Hill bounding both days
Hill bonding one day / Hill springing one day
Hill springing both days

Then a recovery week leading into a hilly 5k.

After that it's 8 weeks or so an anaerobic period. For the first 4 weeks I'll do a progression run and a tempo run, for the second 4 weeks I'll do a long interval workout every 6th day. This will lead into a 5k on January 1st and the an indoor mile or 1500m on January 7th and then end with a 10-mile trail "race" on January 9th.

And then 2 weeks off.

At least that's the plan.