I have been training for an October marathon since the middles of May. For the past week I have been trying to think of away to make this work out a little harder and more effective.

I came across this idea while I was doing today's hill workout. I have been doing the same hill workout for the past 4 or 5 weeks. This morning I was feeling good and I wanted to make things a little more challenging. I got the idea to add a tempo run to the end of my normal hill workout.

My usual hill workout has been a warm up of 1.5 miles. After the warm up run over to the hills begin to run the series of 12 hills. After the hill workout is finished I will cool down by running back to the start. The total workout is 7 miles.

This morning I warmed up and ran the hills as usual. After finishing the hills instead of cooling down I ran for 20 minutes at tempo pace. This made the total workout about 10 miles.

I must admit this workout is a lot tougher. I plan to rotate a ten mile tempo pace run with my new combination workout. My theory is that I will be able to keep the leg strength that I have gained and also improve my lactate threshold with this type of training too.

I have adapted this workout to my marathon training. This workout could also be adapted to different race distances. Runners training for a half marathon would have a great workout for finishing the race strong. By cutting the hill workout in half and still running the tempo pace portion runners could use this for 5 and 10k training.