Is 10 x 40 seconds hills with 2 min rest a good aerobic workout or too much anaerobic ?

It sounds more like a strength workout than aerobic intensive workout, but that can replace an aerobic workout from time to time, if you're in base phase. Still don't replace all your aerobic workouts by this hill workout.

Anaerobic power, specifically glycolytic power.

We used to do this during cross country season when I was in high school. Not very effective for 5k training, but if used at the right time of a training cycle, can be a good supplement

I think this is solid advice. Best of luck with the training.

IMO that can be a nice workout for touching on speed during a base phase, though I try for more rest. It's not really a great aerobic workout (<7 minutes volume, 3:1 rest).

Chepte-GAY wrote:

I want to improve mainly on 2mile-5k distance.

I want to run each rep at 800m effort (i don't know the speed because it's too steep).

The hardest session my athletes do is 8x300m hill on a 3:30 cycle. This is a very intense lactate tolerance session and generally takes 45-47 seconds. Two athletes ran their best 800's in 1:52 and another ran 3:50 for 1500m so it is a small piece of our puzzle to running fast. One of our females ran 9:20 for 3k as well and she does this workout.

coahc wrote:

Chepte-GAY wrote:

I want to improve mainly on 2mile-5k distance.

I want to run each rep at 800m effort (i don't know the speed because it's too steep).

The hardest session my athletes do is 8x300m hill on a 3:30 cycle. This is a very intense lactate tolerance session and generally takes 45-47 seconds. Two athletes ran their best 800's in 1:52 and another ran 3:50 for 1500m so it is a small piece of our puzzle to running fast. One of our females ran 9:20 for 3k as well and she does this workout.

45 seconds for 300 uphill! No wonder they ran 1:52!

For 3200-5k it's not a great aerobic developer though.

CoachB wrote:

For 3200-5k it's not a great aerobic developer though.

What would be an alternative for 5K focused athletes? (Also in the context of hill training)

For 5k-10k longer hill repeats from 400-800m or 1-3 minutes are ideal. Famous session back in the 80's with world champion and 27:04 runner was 2-3 x 800/800/400 on 2k hill with short rest between efforts.

jiggymeister wrote:

CoachB wrote:

For 3200-5k it's not a great aerobic developer though.

What would be an alternative for 5K focused athletes? (Also in the context of hill training)

As far as aerobic development, specifically using hills, I’d say just go do runs of moderate distance with various lengths of hill. Every time you get to a hill run it at threshold or CV type effort. For longer hills (2-3miles in length) do more of a sub T or EASY TEMPO effort. Focus on upright posture, knee lift, staying close to the balls of your feet. Run easy on the downhills and moderate on the flats. I did runs like this most days during the off seasons in high school and college and was never very far away from PR shape (although my PRS weren’t that good, so take this with a grain of salt).

If you want to take the OP workout and modify it to become more aerobic, slow the reps down and make the recovery a quick jog back to the bottom.

Where I coach now, we have literally only one hill and it’s only about 110 meters long. I have a little 300m workout where we run about 120 flat, then up the hill, then crest and open up into the downhill. The instructions are always “if you run so hard that you are gasping or reduced to a walk or very slow jog when you turn around at the end of one rep, you’re running them too hard.

Here’s a video I made back in 2012 of our team doing this exact session. Back then, I let them get a little carried away on the uphills and the session was more of a repetition workout with longer rest. I think they ran the first on in line 49 seconds on that day. The kid that you see blowing up and stopping the workout early was a 1:56 half miler. These days, most of my varsity guys will run these reps at around 62-67 seconds (for guys that are high 16-mid 17 5k cc guys).

Thank you CoachB, your input is always appreciated.

Interesting advices. In Norway "everyone" is copying the Ingebrigstens' training and 2x10x200m hill (do not know the incline, but moderately steep 5-8% maybe). this takes for fast runners around 35s, not more. I understand this is the weekly "1500m"-specifc workout during the base phase so I guess the speed should be around 1500m pace effort. jogging down and then the next. This workout is used together with mainly threshold intervalls so it is the only workouat a week with more lactate.

Hill work depends on what you want. Hill sprints (~10s) develop top speed and strength, longer ones enable the anaerobic processes and long ones are more and more aerobic.

When I was young and running orienteering, my coach made be do a lot of 5min hill intervals (lived in a valley with hills anywhere) and that built the aerobic base and strength to run hard in hilly terrain. I guess it was threshold pace, maybe 10k.

Now as a 50yo runner I focus on strength and speed so do hill sprints and <60s hill intervalls with hard efforts such that I feel the lactate at the end. It definately builds strength as I feel it in my glutes the day after.

I guess 20x200m is a 1500m variation really and that coachc has great advice. But it also depends on your strengths. Are you fast and can kick ? or an steady grinder type? Shorter ones if you are less fast and longer ones if you already have speed in the legs?

I ment referring to CoachB. Coachc confused me ;-)

hi coachB, what should the pace of effort be up the hill for different types of workouts. fast pace or moderate

Haha but only one of us has had an athlete place top 50 in world xc in 2019.

I saw later that both "c" and "B" gave good advice. I was still confused, maybe less now.

I am thinking that if the rest is held short enough, also shorter hill intervalls are valid as aerobic work even if they can include also anaerobic work

The longer the intervall, the less use of faster twitch fibres and the less element of strength. I think every type of hill intervall related the duration has its purpose and mission also for a 3k-5k runner. Same with threshold intervalls.

I had a nice experience the other day doing ~50sec intervalls at my 6-10min race duration pace, with 30s jog-rest. Quite comfortable, quite fast, really a quality workout at a quite fast pace without too much lactate.

Jon Arne Glomsrud wrote:

I saw later that both "c" and "B" gave good advice. I was still confused, maybe less now.

I am thinking that if the rest is held short enough, also shorter hill intervalls are valid as aerobic work even if they can include also anaerobic work

The original post said he wanted to run 10x40 second hills at 800m pace. Well this is entirely an anaerobic session. As stated we do this session as 45 second efforts on 3:30 cycle with first 2 efforts controlled followed by 6 efforts. On some occasions athletes can't complete warm down due to intensive nature. We only do it 1-2 x per season but athletes that I work with have always benefited from the session. Good luck with your training and keep running hills!

As I understand it still depends on the rest inbetween. If the rest is long enough to recharge the anaerobic processes and basically lower the lactate levels appropriately, it is for sure an anaerobic session. If the rest is too short to recharge and remove lactate, which then will accumulate throughout the workout, it is an increasinig aerobic workout to work with high lactate levels and a fast effort.

For a 3k/5k the pure anaerobic capacity is maybe not very important, but the ability to work aerobically at a high pace and lactate level is quite important.

45s effort + 2.15 rest builds up lactate over the workout and thus trains the aerobic ability to work with high lactate levels, but it also demands high efforts, speed, strength and anaerobic capacity.

So what is anaerobic and aerobic depends on what one mean by the terms

Diva

Coahc and I are talking about 2 entirely different types of workouts. His 8x300 all out is a tremendous anaerobic developer and as he stated, shouldn’t be done that often. I stated that my coach had us do sessions like this A LOT and it wasn’t good for us, especially for developing the aerobic qualities needed to compete well from 3200-5000. Most of the teams I was a part of in HS broke down by the end of the season.

The workout I posted is something my current teams might do 5-10 times in a season but we try to run it at moderate effort. Lately, we’ve been trying to do it more and more like a continuous run. I cited my 17 min type 5k boys as doing the 300s in 62-67 seconds. 67 is probably right at 5k effort for those guys, so they are probably between 3k and 5k effort. What were really trying to do on that session, though, is practice the skill of racing in the hills: keep an even effort on the uphill and then accelerate across the top into the downhill.

Early season this is one of our big sessions for the week. The other is 5 x 1200 at CV effort. We’ll also have a smaller supplemental speed session at the end of an easy run or an easy run followed by a few threshold 800s and a few 200s at 800 pace. The third session is usually pretty easy for the kids.

So, all together our week has: 1 hill session with about 60 second segments at 3k-5k effort. 1 session totaling 6k of CV pace stuff. And 1 supplemental session with maybe 1600 total meters of reps at 800-1600 pace.

What I’m describing is our early season stuff. During that time, we’re kind of forced to stay away from long runs and long tempo runs because of the heat when we are practicing. It’s rare for the temperature at 3:00 when we practice to drop below 95 degrees for at least the first 6 weeks of school. Because of the heat, sometimes we’ll meet on a Saturday morning for a long run early season if we don’t have a meet on that day. If we do that, I give the kids Friday to do an easy oyo run where I don’t tell them what to do