Uphill thresholds: How to run at the right intensity?

Heart rate is a very spotty corollary/proxy for threshold so I'd steer away from that. As you said it can be hard to gauge effort properly on uphills, and it will come with practice. But in the meantime you might take a look at the specific hills they are running on and get an idea of the grade/incline percentage, then match it working backwards from Hill Runner's pace conversion chart.

So for example if their usual flat threshold pace is normally 5:35/mi, and the incline is roughly 5%, their adjusted pace is 6:15/mi.

Its quick, dirty, and imprecise - but it should be a decent starting point for them while they get more accustomed to it.

Why are you having them do such a workout? I’ve never heard of elite marathoners doing uphill threshold runs. It seems you’re looking for an edge that doesn’t exist.

Give this article a read, specifically the section on Sweet Road

letsrun.com

The Rise of Syracuse: How a Cross Country Powerhouse Was Built From Scratch in 10 Years

Jonathan GaultPublished September 15

In 2005, Syracuse was a middling Big East team over 30 years removed from its last NCAA championship appearance. Now it's one of the premier cross country programs in the nation. How did it happen?

Link:www.letsrun.com/news/2017/09/rise-syra...

TLDR: Its a 6ish mile road with 2000 feet of gain that Syracuse would do tempos on. Coach Bell gives a good explanation:

“You’re able to get an aerobic stress on your system without tearing up your legs,” Bell said. “If we went to a track and tried to mimic the sustained heart rate and stuff we were getting, it would take days to recover.”

Its not revolutionary or a silver bullet but there's no real reason to not do this kind of workout

Sorry, 900 ft - 2000ft came from some other article

If you're racing on a hilly course, it makes sense to do hill workouts in training.

For OP, it will probably take some trial and error for each runner. Give them a range of paces and make the goal of the workout to be within that range for the full duration of each repeat. Remind them that you're not looking for pinpoint accuracy with zero deviation. It's OK to adjust along the way. You're going to get a quality training effect if you're "close enough".

Another training cue is to get closer to the avg goal pace on each repeat. So if your goal pace is 6:30, and you're running 5 reps, then you might start out and go 6:20 (too fast), so you adjust and hit 6:40 (too slow). Now you have some feedback, so the important part of the workout becomes self-awareness and objective analysis of your effort at that moment. Basically, you're learning how the right pace feels. Learning the correct pace/effort is the workout.

How long are these runs?

Thanks for your valuable feedback!

Regarding the distance, the would start at about 3 miles and progress to about 5 miles.

As I wrote, this workout is based on Canova‘s ideas. The idea is to recruit a larger number of fibers due to the incline, which is supposed to help in long distance races when fatigue accumulates as the body has learned how to recruit additional fibers once others have tired.

What I noticed in addition from trying this out myself is that you recover more quickly from these as there is less pounding on the legs (and less probably eccentric load?) due to running on an incline at slower speed.

I do uphill tempos regularly to prepare for trail races. It's really tricky to start at the right effort, because it feels easy starting out. You need to back off by something like 15 seconds/mi over what feels like threshold, and within a few minutes the effort will creep up to what feels correct.

If it helps, you can think of it as a bit of a progression where you tell your athletes to start a bit slower and work into it.

heart rate monitors do really help for this sort of thing, but as the other poster said, you can always calculate what pace to run based on the effort and grade, and just trust that calculation.

Great option if practiced with precision, but this is the kind of thing that can be overcooked pretty easily. Maybe hills are more severe where I live, but gradient is the master here, and I'm hearing adjustments of 15 sec a mile, and I'm wondering what slope is being referenced. For example, that Syracuse hill equates to slightly under 3% grade. Very gentle. I mean, I live on a street that's 22% (a monster). The only work we do on that is over-threshold. If you pick a grade steep enough, you can literally do LT work at walking/hiking pace, no running required. So be diligent and disciplined, and I would absolutely use and abide by HR monitor.

Maybe, but you know what's an even worse proxy for threshold?......Pace.

And that's made even worse when you try to convert that flat pace to an uphill pace based on some made up formula.

OP - you say that you're new to coaching - do you know of any other coaches that do uphill threshold? Do you know of an elite runners that do uphill threshold?

I don't, and there might be a reason for that. Perhaps rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, you should stick to what works until you have enough experience to draw from, and just do threshold on the flat (where it is much, much easier to gauge one's effort and stick to a consistent pace).

"Any hill" - Henry You Know Rono

Maybe starting with 800-1600 hill repeats at that effort will help get used to it and increase distance over time. If you start to fast or to slow on the repeats its easier to adjust or fix your pace over time.

I've done a lot of these runs; mine were typically on a 2.5 mile hill, 7% grade average. A good way to approach this is to have them do the same run once a week for six weeks or so. Ask them to do the first run fairly easy/relaxed. In the following weeks, your runners can nudge the effort up a bit as they become more familiar with the workout.

Really, "threshold" is just that; it's about figuring out where the line is between just enough and too much, and learning to stay on the good side of that. Recall that although Marius Bakken made extensive use of a lactate meter gadget, he learned from watching the Kenyans who had figured it out through experience.

It is also helpful if your hill allows the runners to keep rolling for a bit after the top of the hill at the same effort. The quicker turnover usually feels good, and knowing that they don't just get to crap out at the top may encourage them to hold back just a bit.

This type of workout is not my invention. As I said before, it is being proposed by Renato Canova. So I assume he has his elite athletes do these. Canova doesn't call them thresholds but "Long continuous run uphill at 90% effort". Their purpose is to train strength endurance. He has his athletes do them in the "general" and "fundamental" periods, which others would call base and pre-competition periods. Steve Magness also proposes this workout in his book "The Science of Running". He is the one to call them "LT uphill" runs. And he also explains a lot of the theory behind such strength endurance workouts.

Here is an excerpt from a presentation Canova held in Valencia in 2017. It doesn't seem to be available anymore online, but I have it here on my computer.

Examples of long continuous run uphill :
‐ 6 km (gradient 6% ‐ 8%) at 90% of effort
‐ 10 km (gradient 4% ‐ 6%) at 90% of effort
‐ 12 km (gradient 3% ‐ 5%) at 90% of effort
‐ 8 km progressive gradient (3% to 10%) at progressive effort

I am not looking for a magic tool, but I find the ideas behind this workout quite conclusive. And since some of my athletes prepare for trail races, it seems to be quite useful.

I am using uphill circuits of a shorter distance (4x 1 mile) in addition to that in my program, also as a strength endurance stimulus.