Tag: running

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How to run hills, part 2

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- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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So much for the theory of hill running – now I have some practical wisdom to impart, after participating in my first World Mountain Running Championships on Sunday. For instance, sometimes walking is better than running…

slovenia-parade

The race was in Slovenia, just outside the town of Kamnik, on a course that climbed more than 1,200 metres in 12 kilometres. With the exception of a few hundred metres of steep downhill about two thirds of the way up, it was pretty much relentlessly uphill from the outskirts of town to a rocky peak at the top. It took just under an hour for the winners to climb (and definitely over an hour for me!)

I’m still not entirely sure what my limiting factor was. There’s no doubt that my legs were burning as we climbed, but I was also breathing very heavily. After about four kilometres, I slowed to walk a particularly steep section – and found, to my surprise, that I didn’t lose any ground to the competitors around me who were still trying to run. After that, I mixed in quite a few short stretches of walking. Not something I’d anticipated or am particularly proud of, but it just seemed like the fastest way to the top. I ended up in 91st place out of about 150 competitors – not quite what I was hoping for, but a good first attempt at the discipline. The Canadian men’s team placed 13th out of 24 teams, led by a fantastic 30th place finish by Kris Swanson. Maria Zambrano led the Canadian women with a 23rd place.

The next day, my teammates and I hiked up Mount Triglav, the highest peak in Slovenia (and one that, apparently, all Slovenians “must” climb at some point in their lives). We ended up jogging up (and down) a significant portion of the route, allowing us to finish what would otherwise be quite a long hike in under eight hours and get back to the cars in daylight. Surprisingly, my legs felt absolutely fine – which tells me that it was (lack of) aerobic fitness that was holding me back during the race, not my legs.

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How to pace yourself on hills

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I’m posting from a little town in the Julian Alps in Slovenia, where I’m preparing for this weekend’s World Mountain Running Championships (more on that later). Not entirely by coincidence, this week’s Jockology column in the Globe and Mail is about how to pace yourself on hills:

… Fortunately, a group of Australian researchers used the latest technology to investigate this question, sending a group of runners out on a hilly 10-kilometre course while wired with a portable gas analyzer to measure oxygen consumption, a GPS receiver to measure speed and acceleration, a heart-rate monitor and an “activity monitor” to measure stride rate and stride length. The results, published this year in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, suggest that most runners make two key mistakes: They try to run too fast uphill and don’t run fast enough downhill… [READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE]

I did the course tour this morning — 12km, with a steady climb of about 1,200m. I suspect that whatever pace I start out at, it will feel “too fast” by the time I get to halfway!

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Shorter strides are easier on your knees and hips

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

Yet another study advocating shorter, quicker strides when you run has just been posted on the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise site. In this one, researchers at the University of Wisconsin had 45 recreational runners run on a treadmill at their preferred stride rate, then increased or decreased the stride rate by 5% and 10% (keeping speed constant, so a faster stride rate resulted in shorter strides and vice versa).

The results aren’t that surprising: Increasing stride rate by 5% or 10% reduced the mechanical energy absorbed by the knee joint by 20% or 34% for each stride. The ankle joint didn’t change much, while the hip absorbed significantly less energy only when the stride rate was increased by 10%.

Of note, the researchers point out:

[M]any of the biomechanical changes we found when step rate increased are similar to those observed when running barefoot or with minimalist footwear.

So you could read this as an argument for minimalism — or, alternately, you could conclude that you can get the benefits of going barefoot simply by shortening your stride.

Three caveats. First, if you shorten your stride, you’ll take more steps to cover the same distance. Last year, researchers from Iowa State used a computer model to predict that, for a 10% increase in stride rate, the benefits of gentler foot-strike outweigh the downside of taking more strides in reducing your stress fracture risk. Still, it’s hard to know whether this conclusion is generalizable to other injuries. Second, studies have found that deviating from your preferred stride rate makes running feel harder, though there’s conflicting evidence about whether it actually makes you burn more energy. So this tactic might be most appropriate, the researchers suggest, when you’re returning from an injury and reduced load is more important than efficiency. And third, the study — as with virtually all the studies in the ongoing Shoe Debate — is a kinematic one that makes big assumptions about the connections between joint forces measured in the lab and ultimate injury rates. No one really knows whether “a more flexed knee at initial contact with less peak knee flexion during stance” will translate into a lower injury rate.

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Weak hips cause runner’s knee

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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I’m looking forward to going through the research presented last weekend at this year’s ACSM meeting. For starters, a study presented by researchers from the Indiana University found that hip strengthening exercises reduce or eliminate “patellofemoral pain” (“runner’s knee”) in female runners. This is an idea that has been gaining momentum over the past few years — I first heard about it back in 2007 from Reed Ferber of the University of Calgary’s Running Injury Clinic (and wrote about it here).

The Indiana study is pretty small — just nine runners, with the five who did the hip strengthening exercises lowering their pain score from 7 to 2 or lower (on a scale of 0 to 10) after six weeks of twice-a-week strengthening. The researchers are hoping to try the same program on a larger group of runners. Normally I wouldn’t get too excited about such a small study, but given that the idea is also being developed elsewhere (such as this study about hips strength and knee arthritis that I blogged about last year), it’s starting to look pretty interesting. I suffered through an extremely persistent case of runner’s knee a decade ago that kept me out of competition for almost two years, so I certainly wish I’d known about the possibility that hip exercises might help.

If you want to give them a try, here are Reed Ferber’s suggested hip exercises [pdf, 2 MB].

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A few thoughts about training zones

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

Last week’s Jockology column about pacing and deliberate practice contained a “training zone” pyramid to illustrate roughly how you might divide your training time:

training-zones

One of the comments on the Globe site disagreed with this information:

I question the chart they put in this article. For a 40 minute 10 km, they say spend 20% of your training time at threshold, and threshold is 4:00 to 4:21 min / km, but to run a 40 minute 40 k your pace must be 4:00 for the race. I doubt you’d get there if you’re only running 4:10/km in training 20% of your time, and the rest at 4:45 – 5:25 as they’ve shown. Seems insufficient.

I was surprised to see this comment, because to be honest, I was worried it skewed too much in other direction — i.e. that the training it recommended was too hard! Some background: this idea of a 70:20:10 split between “aerobic,” “threshold” and “maximum” training zones (the names vary depending on who you talk to, but the ideas are fairly consistent) came from talking to Carl Foster, a professor at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse and past president of the American College of Sports Medicine. It’s by no means an iron-clad rule, as there are obviously many different ways to train successfully. But Foster said it was a common pattern that had emerged from studies across a variety of endurance sports like running and cross-country skiing. In my opinion, the key message here (and the reason I use this pyramid) is that the majority of your runs should actually be quite easy — something I think many beginners don’t realize. I know that when I started running, I was going as hard as I could every time I stepped out the door, and I think that’s a common experience.

When I check it against my own past training, I find that it gets me into the right ballpark — though I tend to do LESS training in the threshold zone than he recommends. To illustrate, here are a couple of sample weeks that I would alternate in a 14-day cycle when I was in my best shape (in kilometres):

Workout “aerobic” “threshold” “maximum”
Mon 8k easy 8
Tue am 8k easy 8
Tue pm 5x(800/300) 8 6
Wed 13k easy 13
Thu am 16k progression 11 5
Thu pm 12x60s hills 6 3
Fri 13k easy 13
Sat 1600/8k tempo/5×300 8 8 3
Sun 20k easy 20
TOTAL 120 95 13 12
Percent 100 79.16667 10.8333333 10
Mon off 0
Tue am 8k easy 8
Tue pm 6×1600 8 10
Wed 13k easy 13
Thu am 8k tempo 4 8
Thu pm 8×300 8 3
Fri 13k easy 13
Sat 26k progression 13 13 0
Sun 16k easy 16
TOTAL 117 83 21 13
Percent 100 70.94017 17.9487179 11.1111111
14-day average percentages: 75.10549 14.3459916 10.5485232

So I was generally right around 10% for the hardest zone, a little lower than recommended for the middle zone, and and little higher for the easiest zone.

Note that the McMillan pace calculator has quite a big gap between what I’m calling the “aerobic” and “threshold” zones. (Other coaches like Jack Daniels also agree with this approach, suggesting that this “dead zone” is fatiguing without offering any major training benefits.) For the 40-minute 10K runner above, there’s no training recommended between 4:21 and 4:46 per kilometres. For a 30-minute 10K runner, that dead zone is between 3:16 and 3:40 per kilometre. Because I did many progression runs (and even my “tempo” runs were generally run getting progressively faster), I actually spent quite a bit of training time in the dead zone. In the chart above, I’ve included those kilometres as “threshold,” so if anything I’m overestimating my time in that zone.

Of course, I didn’t always train like that. Those sample weeks were from 2003; in 2007-2008, I started doing a long tempo run on Saturdays, and often doing one other long fartlek that primarily stayed in the threshold zone, so I probably did more than 20% threshold (but less than 10% maximum).

Anyway, just thought I’d throw that out there and see what people think about the right balance. Do I need to stop using that pyramid?