I'm sort of lucky, I have this 5 mile route that has 4 up hills in the route. I ran this a lot during the winter, it's such a cardio killer, in a good way! I did my first run of the spring trying to stay at a certain pace, which was a 8 minute pace, and surprisingly held it quite comfortably. Proves my theory that running hills will increase, well it's not a theory more of a reality
Thanks for the reminder. I was reading excerpts from Owen Anderson's "Running Science" on Amazon the other day, and he confirmed the importance of hills, intervals, and tempo running. As soon as I can run early mornings consistently bare, which means as soon as I have good, dry surfaces with good traction on a daily basis, my plan is to run 3-5 miles every morning, mixing up the paces, and then run one long or longish run on Saturdays. My neighborhood has a lot of hills, so I could plan a route that snakes around and hits most of them for my 'hills' day, instead of just running up and down the steepest hill, which is what I did last year, but which gets boring.
But for another few weeks conditions will be variable as to bareability, so I'll continue seeking out runs in the afternoon whenever it's feasible, and, when the following days' forecast is for cold or snow, like this weekend, I'll try to up the mileage a bit to make sure I'm building overall running fitness, in case I have a few down days limited to my one-mile run-commutes while waiting for conditions to improve again.
After that, the approach will be to keep the longer runs to once per week maximum. I would like to end most of my runs still feeling fresh--a bit tired, but not spent. I think this will lead to more progress in the long run, just as my switch to lifting weights every day but for less time each day seems to be getting better results. To further the analogy, perhaps lifting heavy is like running hills, or doing intervals? Seems like short, 20-to-40-minute blasts of medium to high effort should be our daily bread. I want to do that once in the morning, with running, and once in the afternoon, with lifting, if possible.