Quick background: 52yo recreational runner. Heavier than most runners (5’9" and fluctuate between 215-222 lbs), which may be relevant here. Ran half-marathon this morning…2:02 beating 2:05 goal. Use a sports watch and have watched and used heartrate MUCH more in training for this race than ever before.
Today’s race was NOT very hilly overall (~250 ft difference between high and low points), but had rolling hills throughout. Approximate course is detailed here… https://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/view/1614097987. For my “hill” strategy, I decided to commit almost 100% to an “even perceived effort” approach, which is what I understand most experts recommend. I was also monitoring my HR to back my estimation of perceived effort. While my HR did pick up maybe 10 bpm on hills today, I kept it close to even.
The result?..I was SPEEDING by almost everybody near me going downhill, but was also getting regularly passed going up hills. On this not very hilly course, my fastest mile was 8:15 and slowest was 10:26 (with a 9:19 average).
So the question…who’s doing it wrong? Are the vast majority of runners (at least those near my pace) taking the wrong approach to hills? Am I missing something and perhaps have a better strategy available to me? Or maybe are we all “doing it right” and my extra weight simply dictates that I should use a different hill approach than other comparable, but lighter, runners?
Running downhill is a technique thing - if you don’t have good technique it’s hard to run fast downhill without it really pounding on your legs/knees. If you have good technique, it can be a lot of fun to run fast down a hill.
It is relative, however; running down a 5% hill is fairly easy, a 10% hill is hard, and I can’t do anything steeper than that with any speed at all.