July 5, 2006

Central Park, New York City

All Team Training...On Cat Hill

This evening the whole New York City chapter met for hill training. It really is an awesome spectacle to see 150 people all in one place for one purpose. And that purpose tonight was to "hill training.

We did a little warm up around the lower loop of Central Park. It was a great evening in the park. It was a little warm, but not too humid. After the warm up we headed for , so named because of this statue that looks down on the park drive:


The beginners were to train on Cat Hill, which is a quarter mile hill with a 49' rise and at 3.7% grade. I don't really know what all that means, but after running up and down this five or six times I have a healthy respect for Cat Hill.

So the focus of this training was to create an efficient stride going up hill. That meant taking a lot of short steps and lots of arm motion (what Coach Ramon calls the "tiki tiki" movement). My first go up the hill I was chatting up Aurora telling her about my day.

That apparently wasn't part of the training. Ramon yelled at me, "this is the hard part, you should be working to hard to talk. Talk on the way down." Then my workout got a little harder. I followed what Ramon had demonstrated, short strides, quick arms, and you know what? Doing all that I couldn't talk on the way up. Going down was our recovery time, talk all you want if you can..

I was chugging along when I heard one of the coaches say, "this is the last one." So when I hit the bottom of the hill I went "full tilt boogie." That lasted about 3/4's of the way up the hill. Then I started to feel nauseous, then light headed, then nauseous some more and then I started to wheeze. I was like what the F-? So I slowed down, way down, and just took the rest of the run to recover.

Lesson learned today? You bet! When I went all out on the last hill, my technique went to hell in a handbasket, which made me work harder, which was obviously too much. I was fine by the time I got back to the team cool down/stretch. But I found my threshold, didn't even know I was looking for it.

Hey sometimes you gotta push yourself right? We have six or seven more weeks of hill training, so I'll have more opportunity to push it.

And now a picture of my feet:

Jim