This morning had me driving over to the parking lot of a baseball diamond near Chuy’s at 6AM to meet up with most of the other folk doing our regular Wilke climbs. From there its about a 1.25 mile warmup to the hill, rather than almost 3, and Wilke certainly takes all of my strength to do properly. Heck, it takes most of my strength to do at all!

Once we got there and did our drills, Gilbert showed me some better form the leg-crossover exercise. Apparently I need to move more laterally from the hip than I have been doing. Note: I realize that that makes very little sense to most of the people reading this, but I’m not coming up with very good explanations at the moment. Anyway, on to the hill.

Wilke is a pretty short run, all told. Its close to 200 meters, barely a lap around the track, but oh what a difference a little elevation change will make. Well, I say little. It starts out as a decent, but not overly impressive hill rising 10 feet over the first 90 meters or so, then gets steeper - and then gets even steeper. All told it goes up between 50-60 feet. When we started our first assent, you couldn’t even see the top of it with the light that we had. Its pretty intimidating that way.

The rules were to do three laps if you were a beginner, five if you were racing this weekend, seven if you were experienced, and ten if you were obsessed. I chose five, even though I’m not racing this weekend, and I think I got it about right. The routine was simple - run up the hill, jog/walk down the hill, turn around and repeat with no rest. Follow that with two repetitions of running backwards up the hill, and call it a day.

Whew! I’m tired out again just writing about it.

I went out a bit too fast on my first lap, which figures. I slowed down a little on the second one due to attrition, and then intentionally slowed down on the first third of the rest of them (the “easy” part) in order to make it to the top intact. As it was, by the time I reached the top on the 2nd (and following) attempts I was breathing really hard. By the 4th assent it was getting very difficult to lift my legs as high as I was supposed to, and by the end of the last one I was pretty lightheaded.

Time: 74 - 83 - 92 - 90 - 91 (in seconds)

Add in a nice, relaxing cooldown run back to my car, and that was my morning.

How was yours?

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