Saturday Hills

With so much beautiful, hilly, scenery around us it's hard to find any excuse to avoid the perfect place for hill training. Even the weather forecast of high winds and heavy rain easing to showers later didn't put me off. As it happened the worst of the rain seems to have passed over last night and while there was plenty of evidence of it out and about (including whole paddocks under water - wish I'd had my camera) the rain held off. I drove up to Tauwhare school and ran from there so I could run through Scotsman's Valley for the whole run. It's a great place to train as even though the out leg is all heading uphill it's also very undulating so every time you go up you get a brief downhill or flat bit to recover. There was a pretty major headwind which hit me as I got higher up and at one point I seriously felt like I was running but standing still - the good news was this was just before I turned round so I had the benefit of a lovely tail wind all the way back down. I'm starting to get a better technique on the uphill which is definitely helping - higher knees and pumping arms. One word of advice, don't get so focussed on your technique that you forget to stay at the side of the road - windy roads, cars, runners - never a good combination. Ooops, if it's any consolation I probably got a bigger fright than the car driver.