Yesterday, I was in Hermosa Beach for a party reuniting old friends and it was a wonderful time. Had I thought about it more, I would have, (you all remember woulda, coulda, shoulda?) gotten there earlier and drove one beach city over to Manhattan Beach to do a sand dune workout.

What prompted me that it’s time to hit the dune again was an article by John Berardi and Scot Prohaska titled “Indecent Intervals” where they outline their experiences and interval workouts with the famous sand dune.

If you can’t make it to the sand dune for the intervals, you’re not off the hook. Berardi and Prohaska share 4 more gut-wrenching interval workouts every bit as challenging as the sand dune.

On a cool, overcast Saturday morning, I decided to go back to Sand Dune Park and do another workout. I left the weighted vest at home, skipped on the push-ups at the top and the bottom of the hill and brought Val so she could join in the fun.

There were quite a few people there, much like last week and some people added to the difficulty of the climb by walking up and down…backwards. Another pair of athletes did lunges. Still another pair did sprints to the third cone. I did some sprints behind these guys knowing I could never catch them put it gave me something to focus on. but the most unusual was a couple who did bear crawls from the bottom to the top. I gotta try that next time. Looked challenging! Instead, here is what I did:

Walked up the hill and ran down 3x, full recovery between sets
sprinted to the third cone 5x. I don’t know the distance (not far) and each took about 28 seconds of sand churning fast feet. The key is fast leg turnover. My total time was 38 minutes for the Good Times.

Val did 3 laps up and took the stairs down. This was after her 7 mile run earlier and before her Sunday long run. Her comment at the top of the first climb was that “this hill kicks ass”. Well put.

I used to live in Manhattan Beach a little better than 10 years ago and a mile away from home was this interesting little park, an anomaly in a residential neighborhood called Sand Dune Park. I visited it once and tried to run up it but did not get too far. I have been wanting to go back and today was the day. The morning was a cool 57 degrees, but things heated up quickly.

The idea, of course, was to fashion a workout for The Dune. Initially, I thought I would run up it 5 times and do 15 burpees at the top and 15 push-ups at the bottom while wearing a 20 lb weighted vest. Once I got there, I walked up the hill without the vest to assess the situation. What I came up with was skip the run-not possible, skip the burpees-I would probably hurl, but keep the vest and do 5 laps with 20 push-ups at the top and 20 at the bottom. Written out, it looked like this:

5 rounds, with weighted vest,
20 push-ups
Walk hill with recovery on downhill
20 push-ups.

Nothing quite like walking up a steep grade where your feet have no firm traction. The first round went well but by the third through the fifth, I was taking 25 steps at a time and taking a short rest. Eventually I got to the top where I was looking forward to the push-ups! The iPod came in handy today. This is what the splits looked like:

5:17/6:58/7:19/8:28/8:17/ Total time was 36:19 with an avg. HR of 168 and a max of 167.

There were quite a few people here and I was surprised by the mix. There were some MMA guys, an active Marine, some runners, some obese people, an elderly woman, and surprisingly, a lot of high school age kids doing workouts including walking the hill, short running sprints and one guy was doing lunges but I don’t how far he got. One of the runners, a petite woman had just finished 15 laps and looked no worse for the wear. A number of people I spoke with do this once a week. For those who do not wish to take on the hill, there are steps to the top as well. I will definitely do this again, but will leave the weighted vest at home and may also mix in some stairs and yeah, Burpees!

I have some more pictures posted here.

powered by performancing firefox