From my experience and what I've read, you'll likely only want them in 4 to 8 week chunks. However, it all depends on how your season is set up. I notice that a lot of people who get into triathlon have these uber long seasons put together....ie they want to be in peak condition from April until October, which just isn't realistsic for a runner.
Then you have the people who have no concept of a season and just want to be ready to race at the drop of a hat. Their workouts are ala "flavor of the week."
Typicaly I like to use a base building period, a preparation phase, and a racing phase. This whole cycle should take 4-8 months. Assuming you aren't training for an Ironman, the base is about 40% of that time, the prep phase is 20-30%, and the racing phase is the rest. The hills go in the prep phase. The idea is that, though the hills do make you run stronger, you'll likely want to ditch them for more race specific type training in your racing phase. You'll lose a little bit of your leg strength, but you'll gain racing fitness through interval training.
So, if your cycle is 4 months, do hills for a month. If it's two months, do them for 2 months.
Of course, all of these rules can be thrown out the windiw for many reasons:
- You have a really hilly race coming up ( = more hills)
- You get too beat up on the track but not on the hills ( = more hills)
- You respond really well to hills ( = more hills)
- You don't respond to hills ( = less hills)
- Hills beat you up ( = less hills)
- You only have time for two workouts a week ( = long run and tempo run instead)
etc.
I don't know how complicated your program gets, but if this is too high level, then just make sure you cycle on and off of the hills. ie do hill training for 1-2 months and then do something else in place of it for 1-2 months. Repeat.
-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485