Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour. -- William Cowper
You can't experience all the flavor of running if you don't vary your workouts. Add a couple of new workouts to the same old 3-mile loop around Lady Bird Lake and you'll be amazed how rejuvenated you feel after the first week. Not only does the variety add something new but it also challenges your mental and physical abilities. Your body develops muscle memory doing the same routine over and over. By introducing something new, the body, which has no recollection of how to perform this new task, must adapt accordingly. The more this new workout is done, the more the body will adapt and develop stronger muscles and new muscle memory.
We're lucky that we live in Austin for the hills. Not only do the picturesque hills of Central Texas make for nice canyons to hike through, they make for a great prop to use for resistance training. Whether you choose a course with varied hills or run up and down the same hill over and over, you will be adding a form of resistance training that will make you a stronger runner. You should insert hills only after running on a flat surface at a comfortable pace for at least a month.
At first, warm up for two or three miles, then add a hill that is safe without too much traffic. Your first climb it doesn't have to be fast. You'll go up and you walk or jog down and repeat. It's really important that your body weight is pushing off the ball of your foot and you are upright or leaning slightly forward. The best way to teach your body how to do that is to go up hills because, of course, you'll lean into the hill. Avoid pounding or going too fast on the descent.
The key to hill training is to limit the activity so that you don't injure the back of your lower leg. Plantar fascitis and Achilles tendinitis can form if you take on hills with too much intensity, especially at the beginning, so don't try to sprint the hills right away. Add them slowly until your body gets used to the challenge. Then do a set of three to five hills so that the added effort becomes a form of resistance. Your goal is not to become a sprinter, but rather to become an efficient distance runner. So run up, but keep the effort manageable and you will tend not to injure yourself. The hills will teach your body to push off quickly and improve leg turnover speed. Just remember that if you are running and not doing hills, you are not getting complete efficiency out of your stride.
Another workout that will change things up is the Fartlek. It's a funny name (Swedish word for speed play) but a simple speed workout where you speed up when you feel good and then slow down to recover. You repeat this speed-up and slow-down routine as if you were doing a track workout but the distances are set arbitrarily. Instead of running hard for 400 meters, you may pick out a landmark of say, a bridge, and run to it. Once you arrive, then jog to another selected point while your heart rate recovers. If you are running with someone else, trade off who selects the next landmark. That makes for a fun run and one that you may find pushes past your comfort zone, so you work harder than you would push yourself.
Fartlek can be inserted into your schedule whether you're training for a single mile run or a marathon. Divide the total distance you plan to run into 20 percent warm up, 60 percent Fartlek running in the middle and end with a 20 percent warm down. You should not walk during a Fartlek workout but rather, vary your pace of faster and slower and distance traveled so that you can complete the workout. After you do a few of these workouts, you should see an improvement in your aerobic endurance, as well as anaerobic threshold. The anaerobic threshold occurs at the transition phase between aerobic (respiratory and cardiovascular systems can provide and maintain required muscle oxygen) and anaerobic running (respiratory and cardiovascular systems can not provide and maintain required muscle oxygen. Lactate is produced in greater abundance during this phase.) This will allow you to accelerate when you increase the pace. You will find that your easy runs become much easier and your hard runs become much more bearable.
Keep it fun, keep it varied and you'll enjoy the running spice of life!