When is a hill a hill?

That seems like an odd question to many but when running the question comes up. There are real definitions to what defines a hill in a race based on length and incline. When I train I always determine what a hill is by how hard it is to get up it :-) or how many times I can go up and down it.

Well when I am home I have a couple of routes with "hills". I know these are not big hills but one never really knows for sure until one runs big hills. My normal hills I run at home look like the picture below:

Now you can ignore the little spikes - I was not doing hurdles - seems every now and then my Garmin throws in one of these. So if you look closely you see an 80 ft climb over a distance of a little less than .4 miles. It is an ok incline.

So this past weekend I spent 3 days running in San Francisco where the hill profile is a little bit different.

The spikes are again the Garmin but as you can see here - two little hills and the big ones. And I do mean big - 250ft of climbing over 2/3 of a mile. The last less than a tenth of a mile climbs 75 of those feet.

Now I know what real hill training means. I cannot wait to go back to San Francisco :-)