Trail Running – Running Workouts

Training Tips

High-Tech Trail Workouts

Who needs a track? I can remember the days when my Queen’s University cross-country coach, Dave Grant, used to take a measuring wheel out to various trails and mark out 400m intervals with ribbon tied to the trees. I can still remember doing ladder workouts along those trails – 400m, 800m, 1,200m, and 1,600m intervals with a 400m jog recovery. We were working hard over the kind of terrain we were likely to find in many of our key races.

It only makes sense that the more you can duplicate your race conditions during training, the better prepared you will be for upcoming races. Thanks to impressive developments in GPS technology over the last few years, it’s now possible to do precise workouts virtually anywhere, even without a coach. With just a little bit of preparation, you can come up with some great workouts to prepare for an upcoming trail race. Even if you’re not gearing up for an event on the trails, using the trails for some of your speed workouts, especially in the early season, can provide a welcome change to the roads or track and, thanks to the softer ground, can also be a lot easier on your body, too.

Here are some suggestions for workouts that use the latest technology:

Interval timers:

Many running watches now come with interval timers – a feature that I fear is rarely used by many athletes. A few minutes with the instructions booklet will help you figure out how to set up a workout that includes the following: 10 min warm up; 4 x 3 min with 2 min rest; 5 min steady run; 5 x 1 min with 30 sec rest; all followed by a 10-min cool down.

Heart Rate Zones:

A great way to keep yourself honest during your next steady paced run is to set up a couple of heart rate alarms to ensure you stay in the right zone throughout the workout. I’ll often set things up with the lower limit at 10 per cent below my anaerobic threshold and the upper limit right at my AT (you’ll need to know your baseline values to do this accurately). After a warm up, I’ll try to do 20 to 30 minutes keeping my heart rate in the correct zone, doing my best not to set off the alarms. If you’re gearing up for a longer race like a marathon, you might want to try and increase the length of those runs to an hour in the correct zone. Sure, you can do a workout like this without setting the alarms, but now you won’t have to constantly look down at your wrist to see if your HR is in the right zone.

GPS

There are GPS watches available, such as the Timex Run Trainer and Garmin 210/410/605, which provide several options for setting up workouts. Most of these watches will allow you to set up intervals based on everything from time to distance to altitude. For example, you could create a workout on your watch of 1K intervals followed by a 500m recovery. If you’re lucky enough to have some serious elevation close by, you could even set up a workout that incorporates 120m of climbing.

Foot Pod

Most watches, such as Polar, Suunto, Timex and Garmin offer foot-pod options as an accessory. It improves accuracy for measuring distance, while also providing input on your running cadence. This gives you yet another option when it comes to setting up a workout – you could consider doing intervals at a certain tempo. For example, you could do a series of 60-second intervals with a cadence of 100 steps per minute, followed by a 60-second recovery with a cadence of about 80.

All of these high-tech devices allow you to download your workout data to a computer, which you can store in a running log. By keeping track of all this information you can measure your improvement and build on the workouts and come up with many more variations along the way. If you’re looking to set and track your workouts, you don’t need a measured loop or a coach – the right watch can handle it all.

Kevin MacKinnon is a senior editor at Canadian Running and the editor of Triathlon Magazine Canada.