The Winter Hill Build for High School Runners

Coach Jason Saltmarsh · USATF Level 2 Endurance Coach · 25 years coaching, 31 state champions

You do not need a track for this. You do not need a clock, clear ground, or a facility of any kind. You need a hill you can find in February and the patience to add one repetition at a time.

That is most of why hills belong in a winter block. The other reason is that they work.

This sits in weeks 13 to 18 of the winter training block, after six weeks of base and before two weeks of flat quality.

Why hills go after the base block

Lydiard put hills between base and sharpening for a reason, and the sequencing is the whole idea rather than a scheduling preference.

Hill running develops leg power and flexibility that support faster running later, while aerobic work continues underneath it. The athlete is still accumulating aerobic volume during a hill block. They are simply doing one session a week that also loads the muscles and tendons in a way flat running does not.

The order matters because each block earns the right to the next one. Hills before a base is power built on nothing, and it produces an athlete who is strong for 300 metres and cannot hold a pace. Base without hills produces the opposite, an athlete with a big engine and no gear change.

The winter argument specifically

There is a second reason hills suit February, and it has nothing to do with periodisation.

Running fast on frozen ground is expensive. Flat interval work in January means repeated hard footstrikes on a surface with no give, usually in spikes or racing flats the athlete has not worn since November. A hill repetition at 800-metre effort produces a comparable training stimulus at a considerably lower impact cost, because you are working against gravity rather than against the ground.

You get the intensity without paying the full impact price for it. In a season where bone stress injuries are the thing most likely to end an athlete’s spring, that trade is worth making deliberately.

The session

Warm up as normal, the same routine you would use before any quality session.

Find a grade of roughly six to eight percent with about 300 metres of usable slope. Steeper is not better. Above about ten percent the athlete stops running and starts climbing, the mechanics change, and you are training something other than what you intended.

Run the 300 at 800-metre effort. That is controlled hard, not a sprint. If they can hold a conversation they are jogging. If they are ragged at the top they went out too fast, which almost everybody does on the first repetition of the first session.

Walk or jog down. Take full recovery. The descent is the recovery and it should be unhurried. This is not a circuit workout and rushing the recovery converts it into one.

Then repeat. Cool down as normal.

The six-week build

Add one repetition per week and trim the pre-session running so the weekly mileage total holds. By the final session the full workout exists, and the athlete was built into it a repetition at a time, which is the entire point.

After the sixth session the hills stop and quality moves to the flat. Do not carry the circuit into the racing season on the theory that it is working. It has done its job.

If your program races indoors

Then you should not run this circuit, and the reason is arithmetic rather than physiology.

An indoor season means racing on Saturday. Adding a hard hill circuit midweek gives you two hard efforts a week for six consecutive weeks, on top of a full cross country season that finished in November. That is the fastest way to arrive at a February championship flat.

On a race week, the race is the workout.

The arrangement that works instead: keep the midweek threshold session as written, and finish it with four short hill sprints. Eight to twelve seconds each, full recovery, walk down. Four minutes of work at the end of a session the athlete was doing anyway. It preserves the elastic qualities that quietly disappear across a base block without adding a second hard day to the week.

When there is ice on the ground

Three substitutions, in order of how well they work.

Treadmill. Six to eight percent grade, 90 seconds at the same effort, walk-off recovery. The closest true substitute, and the only one that reproduces both the grade and the duration.

Stadium stairs or a parking garage ramp. Plowed, salted, and well lit. Check it yourself before practice rather than taking somebody’s word for it.

Flat substitute. If nothing else exists, run 90-second efforts at threshold effort with a two-minute jog. It is not the same stimulus and it does not develop the same qualities, but it is better than cancelling.

Hill sprints are a different thing

This confuses people, so it is worth separating clearly.

The 8 to 12 second hill sprints that appear in the winter calendars all winter are not this session. They are a different gear, a different purpose, and a different cost.

Hill sprints cost almost nothing metabolically and can sit in a week alongside anything else. They exist because turnover disappears quietly across a base block and nobody notices until March, when an athlete who has run all winter cannot change gears. Keep them going in every phase except a taper, a championship week, or a week that already carries the full circuit.

Common questions

How steep should a hill be for hill repeats?

Roughly six to eight percent. Steep enough to load the legs, shallow enough that the athlete is still running rather than climbing. Above about ten percent the mechanics change and you are training something else.

How long should hill repeats be?

For this block, about 300 metres, which most high school runners will cover in 60 to 75 seconds at the prescribed effort. Shorter and steeper is a different session with a different purpose.

How many hill repeats should a high school runner do?

Start at four and build to eight across six weeks, with a cutback week in the middle. Starting at eight because the athlete can survive eight is the most common way this session goes wrong.

Should you run hard down the hill?

No. The descent is recovery, and it should be a walk or an easy jog. Downhill running at speed is where the eccentric load and the injury risk both concentrate, and it adds nothing to what the session is for.

Can hill work replace a tempo run?

During the hill block, yes, and that is exactly how it is scheduled. The circuit is the hard session of that week, not an addition to one. Trying to keep a threshold session and add hills is how a six-week block becomes an injury.

Do hills help with speed?

They build the leg power that supports faster running later, which is not the same as making an athlete faster this week. Sharpening happens on the flat, after the hill block, when the power built here gets converted into turnover.

Keep reading

• Winter training for high school distance runners. The full twenty weeks, both paths, four levels.
• Middle distance training. Where the power built in a hill block gets used.
• Why winter mileage jumps break tibias. The injury the hill block is partly designed to avoid.
• How cold is too cold to run. Thresholds for the mornings when the hill is not an option.

Sources

• Lydiard A. Running to the Top. Meyer and Meyer Sport.
• Running Periodization Part 4: High School and College Periodization. Track Coach.
• Llanos-Lagos C et al. Strength training methods and running economy at different speeds: systematic reviews with meta-analysis. Sports Medicine. 2024.
• Wolff A et al. Seasonal Patterns of Bone Stress Injury Incidence in Division I Collegiate Distance Runners. American Journal of Sports Medicine. 2025;53(3):708-716.

This article is general coaching education, not medical advice. Any athlete with pain localized to a bone, pain that sharpens during running, or pain that does not settle within two weeks should be evaluated by a physician before training continues.