How to Transition to Trail Running

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Runners Connect podcast.

Today’s question is from Melissa. She asks, “ Hi. I have been running for about 10 years obviously, sticking to roads and I’m curious to try trail running.

I was just wondering if there’s any tips you can give about switching any types of foot wear or special types of cross training I need to start to be ready for my first trail? Thanks.”

Jeff: That’s a great question Melissa. I think a lot of our listeners here have that same exact question.

Trail running is only growing in popularity and there are some things that you can do to help better prepare your body for the transition to trail running.

The first thing that you want to do is to strengthen your feet, ankles, and your lower legs. Trails are generally going to have iffy footing.

Having very strong ankles, lower legs, and feet are going to help when you transition into doing more trail running.

The ankle strength is going to help make sure that you’re not rolling your ankle every time you’re out there and help prevent some of that.

The lower leg strengthening muscles will be tested a lot more. When you’re running on the roads or track, your every footstep is roughly the same. Your lower legs and your feet do a lot of stabilization.

When you’re on a flat road, there’s not a lot of work they need to do to keep you stable. It’s a pretty flat, even surface.

Moving to the trail, even if there’s not a lot of routes on the trail, it’s definitely going to be more uneven.

Just the trail itself any rocks or even just little rocks on the trail, any indentations in the ground from footprints other things and then also hills.

There’s going to be a lot of stress that your lower legs and feet must now compensate for, in order to better stabilize you.

The more that you can do those exercises ahead of time, the easier their transition is going to be in terms of you getting tired.

Your lower legs will get a little bit less tired but also making sure that the stress that you put on your intrinsic little leg muscles doesn’t end up creeping up to become something more injury related.

Tiring out those little intrinsic muscles could cause maybe your calves to not fire quite as harder as they would normally.

You might get something in your calf or it might stress out your planta fascia or something like that. Those types of exercise are going to be good for you.

If you do go to Runners Connect in your search on the blog, we do have a couple articles with some good routines, for both ankle strengthening and lower leg strengthening.

We do have some routines available on our blog for free, and then we have a strength training for runners’ program which has a whole section on lower leg strengthening.

We call it our Achilles program since they all have Greek names standing for everything in the lower leg.

The second thing you want to consider is, as you mentioned, footwear. Trail shoes are going to help a lot for a couple reasons. First, they’re a little bit more stable than traditional running shoes.

You’ll require a little bit more balance so they have a little bit more support in the sense of not rolling your ankle as much.

They have much better grip. Generally speaking on trails, there’s going to be times where they’re slippery, muddy or where just getting your footing is a little bit difficult.

The bottom of the trail shoe generally is more studded traction based form. It is going to help you make sure that you maintain grip.

They’re also waterproof which isn’t necessary but it is very nice to not to have your feet immediately soaking wet, as soon as you hit a puddle or anything like that.

Getting a pair of trail shoes will really help. My recommendation is to probably head into your local running store if you have one and check it out what fits best.

A lot of brands have [00:04:50 I complement] to their brand. For example, I’m thinking in this specific case, like the Brooks Adrenalin have a Brooks Adrenaline trail shoe or at least they used to I haven’t checked up on it too recently.

Sometimes that can be a good way if you don’t have a running store. If there is a shoe that you really enjoy, you can see if maybe that company makes a matching trail shoe.

Other than that, you want to test them out making sure that the stiffness and stance is right for you.

The other thing that you’re going to want to make sure you do is as you transition your trails, make sure that you transition your mind to how you’re training and how you’re approaching your training.

Most specifically, you’re going to run a lot slower on the trails than you are on the roads. Both on your easy run days and any workouts that you might try to do.

You have to really realize this and you can look at what your normal easy pace is out on the road and then try to run that on a trail. It’s just not going to happen.

Even if it’s a flat trail more than likely there’s some routes and rocks and stuff that’s impeding your ability to run it specific pace.

When it comes to easy pace on a trail, run by feel and don’t be concerned that it could be significantly slower than what you’re running on the road. Keep that in mind.

Same thing if you want to do workouts.

You’re obviously going to be running a lot slower. Stuff like speed work probably just isn’t advisable. If you are a high-level trail runner and you are competing and running really quickly on the trail that’s what your end goal is.

In that case, you do need to be specific to what you’re trying to do. Otherwise the way I would use trails for workouts would probably to do hills.

If you’re running on trails they’re going to be a little bit hilly. You can do more strength-effort based workouts where you are running the uphill hard and taking it easy on the downhill.

I try to recommend, not necessarily running the downhills, like in workouts if you’re going to try to be going fast. Generally, that’s going to create the most amount of potential for injury both with the pounding and foot placement.

When possible, if you’re doing a workout, plan it to either walk or run the hills easy and down hills easy and then the up hills be the harder part of your interval.

Those are some good guidelines for how you can transition into doing more trail running. Like any type of training also, just make sure that you would if I if you’re concerned about it, transition gradually.

Don’t go from running on the road six to seven days a week to running on the trail six days a week. Try to make that transition a little bit more gradual. That will help you a lot.

Give your body a feel without overworking and overdoing it. I hope that helped answer your question Melissa and give you some good ideas.

Check out the ankle strengthening lower leg strengthening routines that we have on the website. I think will be really helpful for you.

I hope you enjoy the transition to trails being in nature fun thing. Thank you so much everybody for listening to today’s question

I hope you have an awesome run today and I’ll be back with you tomorrow. Thanks so much.