Do you take into consideration climb/descent when planning your long run?

For example, todays schedule is for a 14 mile long run. I could either do 14 miles on the flats, or do 11 miles with 2800 feet of climbing.

Convert it? Why? Mileage has always been mileage no matter where I ran. Hills always strengthened me to run faster on flat.

For every 10 feet of ascent add 3 seconds

For 10 feet of descent subtract 1 second.

A Dogs Dawg wrote:

For example, todays schedule is for a 14 mile long run. I could either do 14 miles on the flats, or do 11 miles with 2800 feet of climbing.

You would hardly even be able to run @ 300 ft/mile. That would mean you are either going up or down an 11% grade the entire run with nothing flatter. I would argue that would be a complete waste of time unless you are intentionally training for a trail race or unless you are running for fun and enjoy the mountains.

poiuytrewq wrote:

A Dogs Dawg wrote:

For example, todays schedule is for a 14 mile long run. I could either do 14 miles on the flats, or do 11 miles with 2800 feet of climbing.

You would hardly even be able to run @ 300 ft/mile. That would mean you are either going up or down an 11% grade the entire run with nothing flatter. I would argue that would be a complete waste of time unless you are intentionally training for a trail race or unless you are running for fun and enjoy the mountains.

That would be 9.6%.

Your legs are weak

Strava will calculate grade adjusted pace. (GAP)

You can also get a garmin app that will display it in realtime. It is just an estimation, but helps if you have a hard time understanding your training compared to flat running. IMO it is better to track heart rate instead. GAP gives a false sense of hitting paces you eventually need to race at, assuming you are training for mostly flat races.

It’s really hilly where I live and over the years I’ve found every 1,000 feet of gain is roughly worth a mile of flat running. Not sure how accurate but for me seems to be a decent approximation. I don’t log extra miles but just use it to gauge training stress.

I just run. You'll know the difference. What is there to plan or account for? Just run.

A Dogs Dawg wrote:

I used to live in the flat midwest. No matter where you went you would never see more than 100ft of elevation change over a 10-18 mile long run.

Now that i live in the PNW a "flat" long run has about 500 ft of climbing, and a hilly/mountain long run has 3000 feet.

Is there a good method of conversion for comparing two long runs with different climbing? Obviously i can just use time post run, however while i am planning the route it would be useful to estimate the total effort that would go into the run. For example something like: adjusted mileage = miles + ( ft climbed / 1000 )

I add 2x sum of elevation in metres to the distance (when start and stop are on the same elevation)

So 500ft will be approx 170m so 340 m longer run. 3000ft would be approx 1000m and 2k longer run.

Normally 0-500ft for such a long run does not really matter, but 3000ft makes a difference you might feel. Of course one needs to be used to all the up and down-hill running, but I guess you already are, living there.

Or just add 0.7 x elevation in feet to the distance...