One Workout
The Trail Edition
PREWORKOUT
Whether you do your workout in the morning, afternoon or evening, be sure that you aren’t doing it on an empty stomach. I normally do my workouts early in the morning, so I’ll have some coffee (with maple syrup and cream) and a bar or banana with peanut butter for some quick energy. If you are doing your run later in the day, try to give yourself time after eating a bigger meal. MAIN SET
Start with a 5 km warmup
Keep the pace nice and easy.
Run 6 x 3 min fast, and 2 min recovery
Run at a hard perceived effort that is sustainable for three minutes. You’ll also want to try to keep all of your intervals consistent. Avoid going out too fast and burning out before you get to your last interval, but also avoid saving all your energy for the end. This takes practice!
Finish with a nice, easy 5 km
This will get your heart rate back down.
Modifications
Depending on your fitness level, experience and training load, there are many ways you can modify this workout. You can adjust the warmup and cooldown. For example, a 10 km total in warmup and cooldown plus 30 minutes of intervals (6–8 km give or take, depending on your pace). Shorten your warmup and cooldown by a kilometre or two if need be. You may also need a little more recovery time between intervals. You can increase the recovery time; even an extra minute will help significantly. Try to keep the workout around 30 minutes.
Terrain
Try to do this workout on rolling, non-technical trails. This isn’t a hill workout, so avoid any major climbs, and skip the trails with tons of roots and rocks. If you can’t get to the trails, you can perform it on rolling roads. Find a loop or area that is uninterrupted by traffic lights and car traffic.
POST-WORKOUT
Yay! You’re done. Grab some post-workout fuel within 30 minutes of finishing your run. Be sure that it contains plenty of protein. Don’t forget to stretch and foam roll. Bonus: take a nice, warm epsom-salt bath to soothe the legs.
Kathryn Drew was Canadian Running’s 2019 Trail Runner of the Year. She won the 2019 Chuckanut 50K and finished third at the Bandera 100K.
Sauna recovery
In recent years, heat has become a trendy training tool, even in Canada. If you’re preparing for a spring or early summer race where you might encounter hot temperatures after a long winter of cool training, then adding heat to your workout routine can help prepare your body for the unaccustomed shock. And even if you don’t have a hot-weather race planned, emerging evidence suggests that heat exposure can trigger adaptations like an increased volume of blood plasma that may enhance your endurance.
One way to add heat to your training routine is to hit the sauna or hot tub after a workout, when your core temperature is already elevated, to stay hot for another 20 minutes or more. That’s the type of exercise advice that doesn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to get people on board. But there’s a catch, according to a study by researchers at Germany’s Saarland Universit y and published in the International Journal of Sports Performance: that extra heat exposure may slow down your recovery.
The researchers tested 20 swimmers and triathletes, half of whom did a 4 x 50-metre all-out performance test before an afternoon workout, then hit the sauna for three eight-minute bouts at 80 to 85 degrees Celsius, then repeated the performance test the next morning. The other half of the group did the same routine, but instead of the sauna, they were given a special recovery oil, which they were told would accelerate their recovery ( but was actually just massage oil).
In the performance test the next morning, t he sauna group swam 1.7 per cent slower on average, while the control group swam 0.7 per cent faster – a statistically signif icant difference. This doesn’t mean that saunas (or heat exposure in general) are bad. But it indicates that heat imposes a stress on the body, which may put extra demands on the circulatory system or stimulate the release of stress hormones like cortisol. In the long term, this stress may help prepare your body to handle heat. But it’s important to remember that in the short term, it may add to your training load and interfere with your postworkout recovery. The tradeoff may well be worthwhile, but the benefits don’t come for free.
Tackling hills
Trail races are often won or lost on the hills – and not just the uphills. Swedish researchers put 17 trail runners through a 7 kr ace featuring almost 500 metres of climbing and descent over the course of two laps, and analyzed their pacing and biomechanics. The results, published in Frontiers in Physiology, revealed some interesting patterns.
The biggest differences between runners showed up in the steep technical descents. While the runners had fairly similar speeds on the f lat sections, their times on the descents varied by as much as 30 per cent. This supports the idea that downhill running – maintaining speed while staying under control and not falling – is a skill that’s separate from aerobic fitness and presumably improves with experience.
When times from the first and second lap were compared for each runner, the biggest slowdown came in the long uphill sections: that’s where fatigue showed up most obviously. In contrast, times on the downhill sections barely changed, once again reinforcing the idea that skill, rather than fatigue or fitness, is what limits your speed on challenging descents.
Previously research on hilly (but not technical) courses has shown that runners tend to instinctively increase their effort level when going uphill and reduce it when going downhill. In other words, we try to maintain even pace instead of the more efficient option of even effort – that’s why you hear people breathing harder than usual on the uphills and then recovering on the downhills. The usual advice in response to those findings is that you should remember to relax on the uphills and push your pace on the downhills. But that only works if you have the technical skills to descend fast, so the new Swedish findings suggest an additional message: practice your descending skills, and you’ll be able to gain time without additional fatigue.