Trail Racing: Walking during steep uphills?

I'd advise that you don't run trail races.

first, your heart rate monitor isn't that accurate. Second, you should worry about perceived effort, not heart rate during a race. Third, walking is always inefficient and slower than running. If you've trained properly you won't need to walk in any race from 0 to 100 miles.

edward teach wrote:

first, your heart rate monitor isn't that accurate. Second, you should worry about perceived effort, not heart rate during a race. Third, walking is always inefficient and slower than running. If you've trained properly you won't need to walk in any race from 0 to 100 miles.

Disagree with all of this.

Most modern HR monitors, especially the ones by Polar and Garmin with a chest strap, provide very accurate data on your HR. But HR can be affected by a number of factors including but not limited to altitude, dehydration, overtraining, carb depletion, etc, etc, etc. A HR monitor can be a great way to keep from overdoing it too early in a long race, especially races of more than an hour in length like marathons or ultras. But you need to know your zones. Don't rely on cookie cutter formulas. Figure out your zones based on monitoring your HR in all your training runs for months.

Effort should closely correspond towards HR.

Studies have shown that walking or power-hiking is more efficient than jogging baby steps when you get to around 12 minutes per mile, which can happen on a steep uphill at altitude in an ultra.

Sprint and walk. Don't run.

Thinking back to the good old days ... 10 miles horizontal,1 mile of vertical gain, and sections with 20% grade while over 12,000ft - you have very little choice but to power walk at times. At 12,000ft, if you go over your threshold, you will not recover "gracefully". I fondly remember passing a Kenyan guy from Albuquerque who had gone out too fast and blew up just below 12,000ft. During this time, I was running < 1:20 for a half marathon at ~5,500ft. I wore a HR monitor during most of these types of races, because if you cross over your threshold, there really is no recovery, except for coming to a complete stop. Also, if you are very close to MAX HR and you are power walking ... what else are you going to do? At lower altitude I never walked ... there was one hill known as "the wall" I was 3 feet behind a guy going up the wall and my face level was somewhere between his ankles and knees - kinda steep. Glory days aside, if you are power walking at 95% of your max hear rate ... that is basically all you can do.

It depends on the distance of the race and the steepness of the hills. Any race over a couple hours, you should try to moderate effort. As for shorter races, on long gradual up hills you should probably slow the pace and keep your effort more steady. On steep short hills, I think you lose way too much time trying to keep your heartrate lower. You could easily lose a minute on the uphill that you can't get back on the downhill because you are limited by how fast you can go, not heartrate. I treat those types of races like interval training. Even if you redline near the top of a hill and have to walk a few seconds, you can recover in a minute or two on the level or downhill.

Like a previous poster said, at times you can powerwalk a hill at the same speed you can "run" it so the powerwalk will take less energy.

Just running a few races will give you an idea of what type of hills you can run and at what effort.

If its a training run, why would you consider walking? Walking is to conserve energy, cost-benefit trade off. But in a training run, who cares about the cost-benefit trade off since time is irrelevant. So run hills, it will make you stronger and faster.

Most trail folks will "speed hike" up very steep hills. There's not much to be gained by a shuffling "run" up the hill.

Here is when you should walk vs run, http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2015/12/15/cu-boulder-researchers-discover-optimal-range-slopes-extreme-uphill-running

I usually try to run everything, but you do reach a point where it's faster to walk on very steep climbs. If your heart rate goes down a lot when you hike, it means you need to get better at power hiking, which is its own skill.

LasseViren10K wrote:

I have run 1:18/2:49 for half/marathon on the roads and am now transitioning to trail racing as my primary surface these days. I have a question related to pacing during major (500+ ft vert) climbs.

1) Should one avoid walking on steep uphills?

2) If you do walk, is it natural to see a large and sustained drop in HR?

3) Is in inefficient to do a climb with HR constantly bouncing up and down during run/walk switches? Is this a sign of bad pacing that is fixed simply by going slower while maintaining a run (instead of walk)?

Thanks. Tried to Google this stuff but the answer is not clear.

My times are almost identical to yours, and I've done a few trail races.

I think the most important thing you need to remember is that trail racing is just that - racing. Running is only one component in that sport (although its by far the biggest component). All that matters is that you finish in your fastest time. That usually means power hiking on steep vertical climbs.

To answer your questions, every race is different, so you want to be familiar with each course. It's okay to see a heart rate drop while hiking up a steep vertical climb, because you'll be fresh at the top of the hill - a really good place to be fresh. But if you give up too much time that you can't get back, you may be better off pushing the uphill and trying to stay within about 20-25 bpm regardless of the incline.

Also, your heart rate is going to be a bit more erratic on trails because the terrain will constantly be changing in a way that you often won't consciously pick up on (for example, one section of a trail may be softer than another, making you work a bit harder).

What works best for me is to hike steep uphills as necessary to sustain nearly constant effort. This should translate to pretty constant heart rate as well.

Unfortunately switching between running and hiking is a bit binary (compared to adjusting running pace but keeping running form) so it's not always possible to tune it perfectly, but I can usually determine a threshold grade that determines when I switch techniques - once the climb is steep enough my "running" at constant effort becomes slow enough that I can hike the same speed. At that point I find it is much more efficient to hike. I also usually have some minimum duration to trigger a switch - if a trail is very steep for just a few feet I may maintain a running form through it just to stay in rhythm (or alternatively, I may walk a few feet of flatter trail on an otherwise very steep climb). If a stretch is more than 5-10 feet though I will definitely switch from one technique to the other. This seems to work well for me.

In long trail ultras it may be worth considering that the two forms will use muscles slightly differently as well. The threshold where you are more efficient running or hiking may shift as sets of muscles become fatigued. I know that I have found myself hating hiking late in some races because I didn't do enough of it during training.

If you haven't practiced this in training, you should. If your heart rate is dropping a lot I would say that you probably need to practice hiking more aggressively (or that maybe you should be running parts of those climbs). Just keep in mind that switching to a hike is not meant to provide recovery or be a way to "take it easy" - you should only be doing it because it is the most efficient way to get yourself up the hill quickly.

I know that at least some people approach climbs as more of an LT or sub-LT interval and are able to sustain elevated efforts on 20-30 minute climbs multiple times during a race. I find that to be really risky for me, especially early on in a race because I can't always recover from those efforts. I think you'd want to transition between running and hiking in a similar way though even if you decide to sustain an elevated effort level. At some point it just becomes more efficient to hike.

Thanks to everyone, this advice is very helpful.

I have actually been trail racing for a couple of years (with power walking as necessary) at this point but only in the last 6 months have I acquired a HR watch which seems to show big drops in my HR when I switch to walking. It doesn't seem like it can be that efficient to do things as I have been during races. It usually feels like my legs are 100% sapped with lactic acid and this is holding me back more than aerobic ability.

My sense is that I am doing things OK but may need to just avoid going too hard on climbs only to end up walking when things get steep. It may just be an issue of properly adjusting pace for incline. Sometimes when I train I decide to go "slow" in order to avoid walking and I end up running just as fast as I would otherwise.