"Attitude is Everything" Kelly Watt
06/23
King of the Mountain Competition
by Coach Lorenzoni
Prize of the 2020 PFP King of the Mountain competition
To give you some extra motivation this summer we are making this competition official and calling it the King of the Mountain. This is optional but we were thinking it could be fun for a lot of you. The goal is to see who can gain the most feet in elevation per mile run over the course of the whole summer. It started June 22nd and will end on August 2nd. To calculate your score, you will need to take your total elevation gained over the course of the summer and divide it by the total miles you ran.
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We will release current rankings at the end of each week. You might be asking how do I track this? There are three options. If you have a GPS you would upload your runs to Strava and it would track your weekly elevation gain and weekly mileage. If you don't have a GPS but have the Strava app, I think you can record each run with your phone and Strava would track the data using that. If you can't do either of these you can use mapmyrun.com to map your course after each run and mapmyrun will calculate elevation and distance.
Hills have many benefits and I've listed a few below.
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They work the heart more. Increases the blood pumping through your body and promotes higher oxygen uptake. Basically, they have a great, positive effect on your aerobic system.
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They force your body to recruit more muscle fibers in your legs which gives you a larger pool to pull from when racing.
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They strengthen your legs in ways that running on flat ground doesn't
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They make you mentally tough.
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Things to focus on when running hills. Perception of effort! The effort should be the same on hills or not, which means your pace should slow down. Keep the hips forward and engaged when running them. Don't slouch from the hips with your butt back! Have fun! Hills are awesome!
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If you aren't a cycling fan you might not know what the King of the Mountain title is. It's given to the best climber in a road race and is extremely well known for it's use in the Tour de France. The Tour de France is a race held every summer that is made up of 21 day-long stages. A lot of these stages are made up of many large mountain climbs. Basically, the first rider up each mountain gets a certain amount of points and these points are kept track of over the course of the entire tour. The rider that is leading the King of the Mountain competition wears a polka dot jersey when racing, like the overall leader wears the yellow jersey. I think it's one of the best traditions in sports.
2017 Tour de France King of the Mountain winner - Warren Barguil
The winner of our competition will receive the cycling jersey above with the Summer of 2020 PFP logo on it. Coaches will be in the competition for fun but are not eligible for the prize.
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Everyone who has a score above 60 by the end of the summer will receive the comfort color tank pictured to the left. The winner receive both the jersey and the tank.
The link below is to a google form where you enter your data after each run. Let me know if you are using Strava, mapmyrun, or another method!
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Date of competition: June 22nd through August 2nd
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To qualify for the competition, you need to record 4 weeks of solid training! Please don't try to cheat the system in any way. You need to enter all of your runs, not just the hilly ones!