Uphill treadmill running

I've seen other discussion about this. Anecdotally, I also feel a little pain in my achilles region when having run on a higher incline (8%) for 40+ min. It seems like a great way to mimic faster paces and get in hill training (I wanted to do hill-specific training), but I guess it's not great for you.

I feel you with cross training being boring. It's not very running-specific, but you could swim? You can get some intense -

heart-wise - workouts in with minimal recovery necessary doing lots of fast 100s, 200s, whatever. Also don't know if you've tried aquajogging, but I guess it's probably much more boring than cycling/elliptical.

Why not just run outdoors?

I have never had any injury problems training on incline. Last year I did a workout where I ran .5 miles flat and then .7 miles at 10% incline. Ended up with over 26 miles and 8,000 ft elevation gain. I just ran a workout a couple days ago where I ran 1 minute at level and one minute at incline. I started at 1% and increased .5% every rep until I was at 10%. I kept the speed the same so the hills got pretty hard.

As with any training, you want to ease into it slowly but running uphill is a LOT easier on your legs because of the reduced pounding.

A good guide is that for every 1% incline, you should slow the pace around 20 seconds. At 9% incline, you will be running 3 minutes slower than at level. The steeper the incline, the harder it will be incrementally.

While I used to do long uphill runs like a solid hour or more, I never run races like that (like mt washington) so I now alternate running 1/2-1 mile at incline followed by some level running.

I'm skeptical of the article posted above, mostly because impact is so vastly reduced. Though, obviously you're going to put a lot of strain on your heel cord complex. That's not a bad thing so long as you have time to adapt.

I've had success using incline to come back from stubborn injuries. I've started at an extreme incline, just walking. Over the course of 8 weeks, I gradually reduced the incline and increased the speed until I was running normally. I've suggested the same to others who have had success. I can imagine that doing a significant amount of uphill running would help prevent injuries as well. Though any sudden and drastic change is likely to cause problems, so I would work in a couple of uphill runs per week at first. And, naturally, if you're going to race on flat ground, you shouldn't do ALL of your running uphill.