We kicked off with the hills training segment of the Sunbird Program this morning at the Mt. Faber training area. As there was a slated Mizuno Wave Run at about the same time, we made some adjustments to the timing and the routes of advances to the twin hills of Labrador Park and Mt. Faber.
Armed with Hills Training tips and a sense of adventure, the Sunbirds were all bright and early, ready for what would be a tough workout to build strength and speed. As some running guru has mentioned "Hills training are speedwork in disguise", we have built in a good amount of hills training into the Sunbird Program to better enhance the sustained marathon endurance and speed of the runners.
The respective Pace Groups were flagged off separately for their independent workouts according to their planned distances and Basebuild paces. There was a good distribution of participants in each of the 4 groups with more runners in the faster Groups 1,2 and 3. The run up to Labrador Park was smooth as the Mizuno Wave runners have yet to be flagged off...already there were race marshals deployed along Alexandra and Telok Blangah Roads.
The Labrador 'Figure Of 8' hills repeats were lapped up with much gusto as the trainees felt pretty strong. All were steady up the hills, being careful not to over-extend themselves since they had more ground to cover at MF. When the time limit was up, most of the trainees were able to do 2-3 repeats, before proceeding back out towards the MF slopes.
The HM Sunbirds were happy they were giving the MF slopes a miss this round as they headed back to ClubHouse for a total of 15km. The FM groups proceeded up Morse Road strongly in spite of the draining workout at Labrador. From there, they went for the 1.6km MF repeats given the stipulated time. Many were strong enough to go for 2-3 laps, with Group 4 deciding to do just 1 lap to save themselves for the remaining 4km run back to ClubHouse.
The feedback at the post-training run debrief was that although they found the hills workouts challenging, they liked the format in which they could do them as teams, making the difficult hills more achievable and quite a number of Sunbirds actually found that they felt stronger after all those hills training.
As we munched on our post-run bananas and reflected on the morning's run, there was a sense of satisfaction as well as anticipation of more hills awaiting us in the coming weeks. The Sunbirds Were Thrilled By The Hills!
