Trail Running: Elevation in Montmartre, Paris, France
Context
Alright, this is a bit of a possibly heated post, but here we go:
I recently ran 1000m of elevation in Paris, more precisely at Montmartre, a
famous place in the French capital.
I ran with Matthieu and we just did some "hill repeats", the hill in that case being stairs that we ran up and down for roughly 20+ times (I stopped counting at some point but I guess we did it 22 or 23 times).
And the worst best thing? I actually enjoyed it :)
See, trail running is supposed to happen mostly if not in the mountains, at least in the coutryside with a lot of nature (forests, woods, ...).
Now, how do you manage to train properly when you live in a big city, and the surroundings are mostly flat? You find a spot with a bit of elevation (20 to 50 meters) and you run it uphill and downhill repeatedly.
I am doing this already where I live, but at least it's in the woods - so doing it in Paris was new to me.
Making it more fun
As shocking as it may sound, there's a lot of things you can do to make it less boring / more fun:
- Uphill:
- do 1 round walking step by step,
- then next round walking 2 steps by 2 steps,
- then next round walking on the side where there's no stairs and it's a bit more hilly - also, there's no tourist here! ;)
- Downhill:
- same in reverse, i.e. combination of step by step,
- 2 steps by 2 steps,
- and running on the side - which requires more focus, otherwise you fall!
Conclusion
While I would not do such sessions every week, it was fun doing it especially with Matthieu.
Doing such hill repeats is interesting as you still train your muscles for the
elevation you'll have on the trail races (granted, it's not as optimal as doing
1000m of elevation straight).
Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see that we did the 1000m of elevation in
barely 8 kms - which is a lot shorter than what I usually do (we ran 18 kms
total, from and to my hotel nearby the Zenith concert venue.
Tags: Running