How to Train for Trail Running Without Trails¶

Train for the race's climbing and surface, not its distance. Treadmill incline, stairs, parking garages and grass give you most of it. Two 50Ks can be different races: a flat one and Speedgoat are not in the same league.

Below is how to do it from a flat city.

Why the distance is the wrong thing to read¶

The Speedgoat 50K lists 3,450 meters of gain, about 11,300 feet, over 50 kilometers. That is more than 350 feet of climbing in every mile. A flat 50K and Speedgoat are the same distance and fundamentally different days.

The same goes for a 50 miler, a 100K or a hundred. Distance is barely the question. How much vert is there? What is the surface? How technical is it: single track, dirt track, jeep trail? Those answers decide what your legs are being asked to do, and so what your training should look like.

So the first job, before any treadmill, is to read your race. Find its total gain and divide by the distance. A race at 50 feet per mile is a different training problem from one at 200. NavRun's plan builder sorts races the same way: above 50 feet per mile it calls a race hilly, above 100 very hilly, above 200 extreme, and it only adds a climbing section to a plan when the goal race has at least 2,000 feet of gain.

Nobody wrote this down for you. That is the only reason it feels like a secret.

How do I train for vert without hills?¶

You are training three things: the climb (aerobic effort at a steep grade), the leg strength that climbing and hiking needs, and the time spent moving uphill. None of them needs a mountain. All of them need a steep surface.

Four places to find one in a flat town:

• Treadmill incline. The most controllable. You pick the grade and the minutes. Much of your climbing will be a hike, not a run, which is also how steep race climbs get done. (More in power hiking for ultras.)
• Stairs. A stadium, an office tower, the stairwell in your building. Stairs are steep, and every step is a climb, so they build the climbing leg in little time.
• Parking garages. Walk or run the ramps up. Walk them down. Every level is a repeatable lap and you can count the gain.
• Grass, sand, soft ground. Not vert, but a softer, uneven surface asks more of your ankles and stabilizers than pavement does. If the race is technical, this is the nearest thing to it that a flat town has.

Pick two of these, not all four. The one you will do on a Tuesday evening beats the better one you will skip.

Can I train for a mountain ultra on a treadmill?¶

For the climb, yes. For the whole race, it covers most of it and leaves two gaps.

Here is the arithmetic. At a 10% grade, you climb 1,000 feet in about 1.9 miles of belt. At 15%, about 1.3 miles. So a 60-minute hike at 15% is a long climb by any flat-city standard, and it adds up quickly across a week. Check your treadmill's top grade before you plan around it. Many machines stop well short of what a mountain climb feels like, and that is where stairs fill in.

The two gaps are surface and the unpredictable. A belt is the same every step. A trail is not: roots, rock, loose dirt, switchbacks that change your stride every few seconds. If your race is technical, schedule a weekend now and then on the roughest ground within driving distance, even if it is only a rolling park trail or a gravel levee. It will not give you vert. It will teach your feet what the race is made of.

How much climbing should I do each week?¶

Start with the rule a lot of ultrarunners pass around, credited to David Horton: you should be able to run in a week what you will run on race day. Hold that for the twelve weeks before the race, taper aside. It was written about distance, and it carries over to climbing in spirit: the week you build toward should hold a real share of the race's vert.

NavRun's plan builder turns that into a number. When the goal race is hilly, it aims your peak weekly climb at 75% of the race's total gain. For a race with about 11,300 feet of gain, that is about 8,500 feet in the biggest week. For a race with 4,000 feet, about 3,000.

Two things about that number.

It is where you build to, not where you start. The planner starts from the climbing you already have in your recent weeks and steps up toward the target across the weeks you have, peaking three weeks out, then easing for the taper. If your last month held 600 feet a week, your first number is near 600, not 8,500.

It needs a lot of weeks. If your race is eight weeks away and your weekly climb is small, you will get most of the way, not all of it. That is a fine place to line up. Hiking the climbs on race day will do a lot of the work your training could not.

How to find the climbing in your own week: your watch or phone already records gain on every run and hike. Add up a week of it. For a flat-city runner that number can be close to zero. That is the starting line.

One more thing NavRun does with that number, and it is worth knowing about because it affects what you will see. If it cannot read climb on enough of your recent runs (fewer than 8 runs, or less than 70% of the last eight weeks carrying elevation data), it does not grade your climbing against the race. It says what it can see and stops there. A flat route or a watch that did not record elevation is not a failure.

How do I get my legs ready for long downhills?¶

Downhill is the half people forget, and it is the half that wrecks quads. Uphill running is mostly an aerobic problem. Downhill is mostly a muscular one: every stride brakes you, and the front of your thigh works while it lengthens.

A flat town has fewer places to practice that. Some things that work:

• Stairs, down. Walk down the stairwell slowly, in control, using the quad to lower you. Down is harder to find than up and harder on you.
• Garage ramps, down. Walk or jog the ramp back down, with short steps.
• A treadmill that declines. Some models do. One small study had seven students walk a 20% downhill on a treadmill for 30 minutes, three times a week for six weeks, and measured their leg strength afterward. Strength rose. Seven people is not a trial of ultrarunners, but it shows the muscle adapts to this kind of work without a mountain.
• Strength work that lowers weight slowly. Step-downs and slow squats count.

Start gently. Eccentric work leaves you sore for a day or two, and soreness on the wrong week can cost you a long run. The full protocol is in downhill running and quad prep. If something hurts rather than aches, or a pain stays, that is a question for a physiotherapist or doctor, not a training plan.

A flat-city week, as a shape¶

Not a prescription. A shape you can fit to the week you have:

• Long run on your flattest, longest route, with the last hour on whatever rough surface you can find. Time on feet is the point.
• One climbing session: 45 to 90 minutes of treadmill incline hiking, or stair repeats.
• One day of downhill work: stairs down, garage ramps, step-downs, kept short.
• Everything else easy.

If your race has 11,000 feet of gain and you live at sea level, you will not match it. Nobody on a flat street does, and plenty of people finish those races. What you are building is a body that has been up and down a lot, on steep ground, for a long time. That is a different thing from being fast on a flat road, and it is one you can build anywhere.

Where NavRun fits¶

NavRun's plan builder reads the goal race's elevation gain and distance, and prescribes climbing to match. The finish-time estimate also takes the race's gain into account, not distance alone. You can read how that works on the race prep page.

The hills are still yours to climb. The plan only tells you how much.

Read the race first, then train for it. Race prep