I spent the first half of last year trying to run faster on the road, having spent the previous two years very mountain-oriented. It was a nice change of pace, both literally and figuratively. This period undoubtedly raised my general fitness; I took ~2min off my 10k PB.
By mid year though, I was finding the road just didn’t do it for me. I ended my brief roadrunning experiment and went back to the hills. Anxious to get my uphill legs back in shape, I did a lot of climbing to the exclusion of almost everything else.
A normal week in H2 2023
Mon - Off
Tues - Intervals on treadmill @ 18% (~500m gain)
Wed - Hilly run (~500m gain)
Thu - easy bike/jog
Fri - 30-40min tempo on treadmill @ 18% (~500m gain)
Sat - Hilly run (~500m gain)
Sun - Long hilly run (~1,000m gain)
Basically no flat running to be seen. This approach for sure made me a robust climber. It got me into real durable shape for Trigger Fell Race (~37km/+1,300m) in January that I performed well at (race analysis here).
Nonetheless, late in the year I noticed that it was getting harder to hit paces on the incline treadmill that had been possible in months past. At the time, I put it down to accumulated fatigue, but now I’m not so sure.
Shown on this graph is my efficiency factor (EF)1 in all my uphill tempos, based on both the average HR for the whole tempo as well as the max HR seen during the workout just to better capture my effort level toward the end.
The trend is fairly clear. In the period above of ~2.5 months, I saw no improvement, at worst a very slight slow down.
Overreaching is one possible explanation for declining performance. However, I track resting HR and HRV daily, and throughout this block all indicators were that I was healthy and recovering well. Subjectively, I generally felt good, no illness, there were no instances of lingering fatigue or soreness, I recovered well day-to-day.
It gets a little more depressing when I add in data from a couple of tempos very early in my ‘return to the hills’ block.
Looking at this objectively, I was at my most efficient going uphill in July shortly after coming off my road speed block.
My uphill interval workouts show a similar trend - EF 0.74 at a speed of 8kph in July vs EF 0.68 at 7.3kph in late December (similar total # of reps and duration).
Was I as durable in July, and able to tackle the same volume of ascent in a single effort?
Almost certainly not. But I was more efficient.
My main conclusion is this.
Complete removal of flat, fast running is correlated with stagnation, at worst decline in my uphill running efficiency. Especially true in the context that my program contained plenty of high intensity uphill running.
So where do I go from here in planning my upcoming training cycle?
The European Journal of Applied Physiology published a study in 2019 that investigated uphill vs level ground running economy.
What they found was that level ground economy was very strongly correlated with uphill economy; in short, if you’re fast on the flat you’ll likely be fast going uphill as well. This sounds like common sense, but in consideration of the difference in biomechanics of uphill vs flat running it is a little surprising that they were so strongly linked (r = 0.909).
It’s important to note that the testing was conducted on a 7.5% gradient. Much less steep than my training, and the gradients you’ll find in many fell races. Nonetheless, the lack of flat economy focused work in my training seems to bear out the conclusion of the study - my stagnant flat economy resulted in stagnant uphill economy.
Kris Jones, author of Footsteps and a great runner in his own right, has published a cool series where he delves into the training diaries of elite runners, as well as his own. I took a look at two in particular.
First, his training for the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships, and Tracey Brindley’s, an incredibly successful mountain/hillrunner from Scotland.
In both, there was some kind of flat, fast track style workout most weeks. This was even during the most specific competitive period where they exclusively targeted A races with a lot of climbing.
Don’t get me wrong, they were doing plenty of hilly running as well, but they still dedicated part of their valuable ‘training budget’ to building/maintaining their flat speed.
It would be easy to be disappointed by this revelation, all those potential performance gains left on the table, but it’s actually pretty exciting. I had a great race coming off that slow, hilly training block, and this analysis has shown a potential path to even better racing in the future.
Calculated as metres per heartbeat, so a higher number indicates I am moving faster for a given effort as indicated by heart rate, thus more efficient.