Hill-o-phobia

Update: For some reason the Runner's World links below are broken. I am in the process of fixing them. If you click and it doesn't take you anywhere and you are super curious, go to Runner's World, click on training and scroll through the different articles, they will flag the hill training stories. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Although hills were much more common thus less scary when I lived in British Columbia, there is always a bit of trepidation when it comes to running hills. Our clinic program (well, once it is adjusted for our missing week) is calling for hills on Wednesday, so I thought I'd post some interesting articles that deal with hill training. The wonderful part about running is the experts can never agree. The only question that elucidates a broader variety of answers to "How do you do hills properly" is "Is butter or margarine better?"

This

is a good article from Coolrunning.com on hill running. It is short, roughly 600 words or so and gives a fairly standard account on why and how to do hill runs.

Here

is another solid article posted on the Runner's World Web site inside its training section. It is two pages long but it is pretty basic. It covers form and the reasons behind hill training.

Another

top-notch article from Runner's World. In this piece, it highlights four different hill workouts and illustrates the benefits to each. It's a short story.

Finally, this

is the last Runner's World article that I will link to today. All four articles here cover similar territory. Each one adds a bit more to why it is necessary to run hills and different workouts that are possible.