1.) Yoga
2.) Hill sprints as speedwork
Less Simply put:
Okay, so maybe I can't quantifiably claim the benefits of yoga, but it definitely does make me feel better. I'm still pretty surprised how tight and inflexible my shoulders and back have gotten from swimming. Yoga session was on Monday evening and I still feel the soreness faintly between my shoulders. Regardless, I have to make sure I keep doing it frequently...and not just for the off-season.
Hill sprints as speedwork, however, I'm pretty comfortable in saying actually work. No questions. I don't have any data to supply, all I know is I'm running faster. I remember about a year and a half ago I read an article in Runner's World that had some silly tabloid tag line like, "A Faster Marathon in 10 Seconds." Those always make me laugh. They're on par with things like, "Eat Yourself to a Slimmer You" and "3-Month Online Advanced Astro-Physics Degree - It's That Easy".
But I read the article anyway, probably because I was really bored and had read everything else in the magazine. To make a long story short, it suggested, after a ten or fifteen minute warmup, to find a hill with about an 8 or 10 percent grade. Simply sprint all out up the hill for ten seconds and walk back down for about a minute or so. Repeat. It suggested stopping after noticing a significant power decrease. Add one repeat every week until getting ten repeats. The concept sounded interesting to me. Uphill so it requires more power and shorter intervals than one would have to do on the track. Also a lot less strain on the knees - pretty much just straight-up quad work.
I started incorporating this into my weekly routine in preparation for the Richmond Marathon last year. I didn't know if I was actually running faster because of it at the time because I didn't have a GPS watch or anything else to measure what I was doing. But I did end up qualifying for Boston so perhaps it did indeed have something to do with it.
Fast forward to the beginning of this year when I started running outside again. As I've noted many times before, I'm still a novice runner and there are tons of training techniques that I have not tried yet; track work being one of them. So I ended up hitting the track once in a while for my speedwork this summer and completely forgot about hill sprints. In my recent freak-out about the possibility of not being ready for the race, I started to do hill sprints again in hopes of finding the magic bullet to ensure my success in the race. Of course this does not exist and is only a product of race performance insecurity...or maybe it does exist.
I went out for a bike/run brick session yesterday. My standard run after a bike ride is a hilly three mile loop. My only goal is to keep it under 7:00/mile pace. Not fast by any stretch of the imagination for three miles, but not so bad after a couple-hour bike ride. Well I was motoring along yesterday, feeling pretty average, and average pace for the run ended up being 6:38/mile! Something tells me I shouldn't stop doing hill sprint sessions.
Well, I've got a bike ride to go on. Maybe a bit of a swim later, then I'm going to go break three hours in a few days.
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