Trail Quality Sessions
Spartan Beast Prep (Ep 6)
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Last article I walked you through my favorite gym session, talked about why strength training was beneficial for both runners and life, and how AI helped coordinate all of it.
Today, we are going to do a deep dive into one of my newer training sessions in this prep: the quality trail run.
Keep in mind, I’m not a running expert nor a professional coach. All I want to do is tell you what I’ve learned and what my experiences are. My knowledge and experiences continue to grow and change prep after prep.
Let’s jump in!
What’s a Quality Session?
So without getting into too many of the nuts and bolts, a quality session is really any run with a purpose besides easy aerobic conditioning or recovery.
I say this because every single run you do should be with purpose. Sometimes the purpose is to run super easy. In fact, the majority of your running should be super easy. The general “guideline” is that 80% of your running should be easy.
“Easy” is not a codeword for lazy or unimportant. Easy runs have a great purpose. They help increase blood flow so you recover faster. They also help strengthen your heart and lungs so you can have a killer aerobic engine.
So what is a quality session?
Well, as I just said, a quality session is really just any purposeful run that’s not an “easy” continuous run.
In a general marathon prep, this might include short and fast intervals, longer and moderately fast intervals, tempo sessions, or even long runs with marathon paced efforts. These are all quality sessions.
They are designed to stimulate other parts of our overall running system. Like our anaerobic capacity, lactate threshold, neuromuscular coordination, and probably other words I don’t even know.
But those words are not the point of this article.
The point is that quality sessions help fine tune our running skill so we can run faster for longer in our upcoming race.
Trail vs Pavement
Which leads us to running terrain.
The terrain you choose to do these sessions on is very important. If you have a hilly marathon, but only ever do tempo session on a flat track, you aren’t really getting the best bang for your buck.
You aren’t training your body to be adapted to the terrain of the race.
Well, a Spartan race is predominantly on trails. Some courses are more technical than others, but at the end of the day, they are on some kind of trail with the steepest elevation they can find.
This means, training on the trails is crucial to adapt to the race day conditions.
However, there is a big issue to overcome:
When you run on trails, even if they are flat, you inevitably will be a little slower than running on pavement.
Add in 20% grade uphill and your pace drops even further. For instance, when I do an “easier” trail run up to Celo Knob, it often takes me anywhere from 16-20 minutes to go 1 mile. Running back down is still technical and steep so my paces drop to around 11 minutes/mile. Typically my run ends saying I averaged around a 14 minute/mile, but if you adjust for the grade it’s more like a 9:30 minute/mile.
All that to say, running on trails often requires altering the plan. If my normal plan says to run 12 miles, that might take me 3+ hours on the trail, when on the pavement it might only take 1:40.
I don’t have that kind of time, and running that many hours isn’t necessary to put your body through week over week.
So what do we do?
Adapting Quality to the Trail
Well, to be honest, the simplest way to transfer a quality session onto the trails is to convert your quality session into time.
For example, lets say your plan says to warmup for 2 miles, then run 10x400m, then cooldown for 2 miles. Well, 2 miles on the trail might take over 30 minutes. 400m is a quarter of a mile, so that might take 5 minutes. If you add that up, we are almost at a 2 hour quality session, which is pretty lengthy.
However, if I say a 2 mile warmup on pavement takes me roughly 15-18 minutes, then maybe for the trail I ditch the distance and say “warmup for 20 minutes.” That could include some hiking, some running, but just whatever effort it takes to get the heart rate up for 20 minutes.
If I can run a 400m repeat in say 1:30-1:40, I can just transfer that to the trail. Maybe I’ll say I’m going to run as hard as I can uphill for 1-2 minute intervals, and then “rest”.
But here’s where it gets fun. From this point, we have a perfect time transferred run. We went from 2 mile warmup, 10x400m repeats, 2 mile cooldown, to 20 minute warmup, 10x1 minute uphill repeats, 20 minute cooldown. Our 2 hour quality session got turned into 50 minutes, which is definitely more reasonable.
However, now we can start adding in some flare. During those 10x1 minute repeats, what do we want to do for rest? We could stand or walk uphill, sure. But what if instead we ran back down the mountain with “purpose”?
What do I mean by “purpose” there? Well, in a Spartan race, we will have lots of ascending, but we will also have descents too. These might be easier on the lungs and heart, but they are killer on your quads. If your legs are not prepared for that stimulus then you won’t be able to race on the downhills.
And the purpose behind the “rest” period in a 400m repeat session is mainly to get the heart rate down. Running downhill fast will do just that, but also train my legs to absorb lots of impact and turn back around to run fast uphill again.
What are my Results?
To summarize, when I started this training block, I took my normal half marathon training plan and gave it to AI to convert some of my quality sessions into trail runs.
And that’s exactly what it did. We converted lots of runs from distance to time. After that, I started adding some of my own flare like descending for my recoveries between repeats.
For example, here is a normal week of training on the plan before AI (note some normal training intervals are already time based):
Sunday: 4 miles easy, 15x90s @ 10K pace, 4 miles easy
Monday: 8 miles easy + 10x10s hill sprints
Tuesday: 2 miles easy, 8x3 min @ 10K pace, 2 miles easy
Wednesday: 12 miles easy
Thursday: 6 miles easy
Friday: 3 miles easy, 6 miles @ half marathon pace, 3 miles easy
Saturday: REST
And here is the same plan, but time based instead (look at the warmups in particular):
Sunday: ~40 min easy, 15x90s @ 10K pace, ~40 min easy
Monday: ~75 min easy + 10x10s hill sprints
Tuesday: ~20 min easy, 8x3 min @ 10K pace, ~20 min easy
Wednesday: ~120 min easy
Thursday: 6 miles easy
Friday: 3 miles easy, 6 miles @ half marathon pace, 3 miles easy
Saturday: REST
*Note I didn’t have it convert Thursday/Friday over because I always wanted to do those on pavement or the track.
I think the hardest part to all of this is coping with my paces. Even my Garmin gets worried that I’m losing fitness. But when you look at how many hours I have on foot, it helps encourage me.
And again, we aren’t training for a marathon. We aren’t prepping to run one continuous pace for 3 hours. We are preparing to run fast uphill, fast downhill, and interrupt all that running with random obstacles. That means everything is compromised and I’m dealing with different pacing and efforts throughout the whole race.
And yes, the race itself will also be about 3 hours, but it will be an entirely different 3 hours than with a marathon.
So the thing I’m most interested in is will my fitness be sharpened for this specific race, will I have fitness gains that transfer over to my next marathon block (which I’ll start shortly after Cincinnati), and how will this effect my fitness when I repeat the Base Test in a few weeks?
I’m excited to see and share it all with you!
Until next time, run with joy!