The Uphill Athlete says you need to do lots of climbing if you want to cope well in the mountains (trail running).
The Happy Runner says too much climbing will make you slow and that improving pace and economy on the flat will translate into good climbing as climbing includes the horizontal component of running you hone best on the flat.
What The Happy Runner says fits my experience. The best I’ve felt in technical trail races was on the back of or in the middle of marathon training with little or no climbing.
I was fit, and the foot speed I had from flat running kept me light on my feet going up and down.
I had always assumed it was because I was just fitter from training from the marathon. I’d never trained that hard for trail races. But either way, it’s hard to train that hard for trail races in the mountains on technical terrain, doing long runs with portions at marathon pace as you do when training for a marathon.
It’s also true that when I was younger that I did well in mountain races training mainly on the flat and fire trails.
So The Happy Runner strikes a chord.
But who knows?
I have also heard that flat running will help you progress quicker in the mountains in the short term but for long-term development and becoming an advanced trail and ultra runner, you’ll get further aiming to max out climbing and hiking.
It may depend on your preferences.
If want to do a bit of everything, road and trail races, short and long, maybe you’re better off always working to improve running economy, i.e. doing lots of flat running. If you’re always going to be in the mountains, perhaps you can forget about running speed.
I live near mountains, so I can do both. Perhaps a 3-3 approach would work. Three days in the mountains and three days on the flat or rolling hills with one day flat for recovery. I could change the training focus — make one or the other type of run more recovery — as I changed event focus.
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