Training for Trail & ultrarunners

Mountain running and road running are, at best, distant cousins. Yes, both are “running,” like freestyle and butterfly are both “swimming ” but require different techniques. Running is a form of locomotion that contains a flight phase, where both feet are off the ground at the same time, and only one of the runner’s feet touches the ground at a time during the stride*. Both road and mountain running fit this definition. But that’s where the similarity ends.

Leg strength and leg specific muscular endurance play a much larger role in mountain running. The best evidence for this is found when comparing the legs of world class marathoners with world class mountain runners. The elite mountain runners will always show much bigger and well defined upper leg muscles than their marathon counterparts.
The demands of mountain running, where there is typically a great deal of vertical gain and loss, requires the strength and muscular endurance to not only climb, sometimes steeply, uphill but as importantly is the requirement to resist gravity when running downhill. The impact loading of running downhill can generate forces of several time body weight on each leg on each stride. It is those bigger leg muscles that give the mountain runner the durability to resist fatigue.

Special training methods developed and refined by Evoke Endurance have helped hundreds of mountain runners, from those just getting started to some of the top professionals in the mountain runner world perform at their peak. For a more in depth look at training for mountain running please read this article.