PHEW today was HARD! I was over-zealous with my hill run and learned real quick that running hills is a lot harder than I thought it would be. On my agenda for today was to run 6 400 meter hills with an equal distance walk in between each hill repeat. Honestly, I thought today was going to be pretty easy...6 hill repeats..in, out, done. I was WRONG!

I warmed up with a run at 6 mph for one mile. Then after a mile, I set the treadmill to an incline of 10 and put the mph at 7.0!!! What was I thinking?? I ran it for prob. 2 minutes before I realized there was NO WAY I was going to keep that up. I lowered it to 6.8....6.5...and finally settled on 6.3 as I finished out the 400 meters (or .25 miles) that I was intended to run at this incline.Then I walked for another 400 meters at 4.0mph. The next hill repeat, I set the treadmill at an incline of 10 again and went right to 6.3mph. This was much better buuuut realllly hard. I was able to run the full 400 meters but had to hold onto the handrails on the treadmill (a bad habit that I have even when I run normally...I seriously CAN'T run without holding onto the treadmill..it's like a fear or a safety that I have when on the treadmill). But I realize that holding on, especially with the hill repeats, was cheating because I was using my arm to pull me along. Today, I was just concerned about actualy getting through these hill repeats no matter how I had to do it. Hopefully as I do more of these, I won't have to hold on, today: it was a must. As I said before, this was significantly harder than I thought it would be but I like it! It was a great mind over body challenge. As I'm reading Marathon Woman right now about the first female Boston marathoner, I'm realizing that I need to challenge myself more and that half of what limits me, is just in my head.

I'm conflicted as to whether or not I should write 4 miles, or 2 1/2 miles because I walked a lot of today's run for my cool-down in-between each hill repeat. But all in all....I was on the treadmill for about 50 minutes, sweating like K-R-A-Z-Y and it was a damn good workout. So, I'm going to put myself down for 4 miles today.

Miles Run today: 4
Total Miles Run for 2010: 391 

When keeping track of miles? Do you include any walking?? What about during speed training when you walk in between speed drills? Do you include that mileage?? I don't know!