A bit of an epic hill session

Not the hill we ran - just a view of the town

21M double; hill rep session & recovery run
16M am speed session including 20x450m (up) hill reps with jog (down) recovery
5M pm recovery run at ~8.00-9.00min/M

I knew this morning was going to be another toughy – Coach Sentayehu had told me as much. But I didn’t know what was in store.

We headed to ‘the forest’ – which Coach and co refer to as their cross-country training course. Apparently it was a bit of a favourite of Bekele.

We warmed up for 30 minutes before embarking on a 2 hour long hill rep session. I was following Ibrahim’s lead as usual. We were joined by a couple of other male athletes and two or three female athletes. Initially, I thought we were taking them pretty steady, but by rep number four I decided it was going to be a killer and locked down into non-counting mode and waited to be told when it was over (or at least nearly over).

The hill was steep initially and then relentlessly but more shallowly up. A really good slope for our purposes. Each rep took about 1 min 35s – 1 min 40s, so it was probably not far off being a good VO2 max-type workout on top of the power. The recoveries were long. Probably three and a half minutes.

I can see this week in Bekoji will be one of my hardest ever. The intensity is relentless. But I’m feeling good. And niggle free. So I’m looking forward to reaping the benefits.

Pasta for breakfast along with a banana, a macchiato and some tea! Then some snooze.

We went for a dead slow recovery run up at the track in the afternoon with Ibrahim.