6% Rate of Climb

Work is really busy at the moment, my lunchtime is disappearing under a flurry of meeting notices. Only one thing for it run in the morning on the treadmill. Nothing unusual in that you may think, but today I tried running a hill session on it. Shall we say it was interesting.

Straightforward session 2 mile warmup 4 * 400m intervals and a warm down. Warm-up OK then the first (virtual) hill. When I was thinking about this last night I didn't know what incline to set the treadmill at. So I read he Runners World Article about hill training in particular that 4000 ft hill in 13 miles. By my calculations that was a 6% climb. OK I'm only doing 0.25 mile reps so that should be easy enough. WRONG!

Got the machine to he 6% then 6:40 pace, by 200 metres I was struggling, hung on till the end of the rep then realised that unlike outdoor running where you stop at the top of the hill and jog back, the treadmill keeps going until told otherwise! Start pressing buttons to get the elevation and speed down to find nothing happening. PANIC! Jumped off and hit the stop button. Worked out that the treadmill can only obey one button at a time so if I'm pressing the speed button and the elevation button at the same time it ignores both - charming.

Climbed back on and had a recovery jog and started over again. This time I was ready for the end of the interval. Do the elevation then the speed. But this session was tough by the last rep i was managing to push my HR upto 184. Last interval involved a full stop again and me hanging over the front of the tready.

All I can say is I'm glad I only have to do this session once every 3 weeks.