Hill Repeats

Tonight I learned what the Gemara means when it discusses a yerida l'tzorech aliyah.

Our group training session tonight was called "Hill Repeats".

That means we ran up a hill (mountain really) a lot of times. We ran down Yarqon as a warmup run, all the way down Tze'elim to a bit past the traffic circle down towards the 38 highway. After that began the repeats.

From there we ran up the hill, back down the hill, and repeated it 3 times. That hill is a killer hill, even though I have run it a number of times on my personal runs. The truth is that you cannot run anywhere in the BS area with running a serious hill. But this was a serious hill we ran 3 times.

We were breaking it up by experienced runners and novice/beginners. Experienced runners would run up the whole hill 3 times, while novice would run just until the steep part.

Even though I am a novice (someone told em tonight I am no longer a beginner!), I felt like running all the way up. So I did, the first and third time (the third time everyone had to anyway in order to run abck to the meeting point). The second time I ran to the steep point. I am not sure I would have made it at a reasonable time (if at all) the third time had I run the whole thing the second time as well.

This was a yerida l'tzorech aliyah. We only ran down so that we could run right back up.

Another thing is we were supposed to run it at a good pace, not at a crawl (the way I normally take uphills).

So at the end of the day, I ran 11km (including the run home after we finished the group run), most of it being uphill, at a faster pace than my average has been. My average pace tonight was 6:09/km.