Besides the fact that both would contain running as part of their title, it often seems as if trail running and road running are two completely different activities.
The good news is that if your Road Runner that is a lot that you can learn and benefit from doing a certain amount of trail running that will help to improve your road running a whole lot.
Pacing
When you step out onto the trails you will very soon learn that it is absolutely impossible to run by pace.
What you have to do in trail running is to learn to run by feel. That is a feel for a consistent perceived rate of exertion rather than trying to rely on what you watch is telling you as regards to current pace and average pace.
This means that while trail running. you will need to internally measure your feelings of exertion rather than your pace. Getting the hang of this is something that will help you to be able to hold a pace when you next are racing on the road because you’ll have a good sense of where your level of exertion is at all times.
Variety Of Workouts
As you already know as a roadrunner, you use very different workouts to bring variety into your training. Well, just being out on the trail puts variety into each and every run that you do.
There is a myth among road runners that trail running makes you slow. That is simply not true at all. It is the lack of doing speed workouts within your training program that makes you slow.
So you can be doing all of your training on the road but if you’re doing no speed work whatsoever, you’ll be getting slower. So, if you doing a whole lot of trail running as part of your road running workouts remember to incorporate speed sessions on the track or on the road as a way of maintaining or building up your speed.
Mentality And Psychology
Roadrunners can get tunnel vision about pace and distance. If you take the time to step out onto the trails then suddenly pace and distance have no bearing on your run whatsoever.
That allows you to just chill out and enjoy the run. This can often be incredibly useful when you need to be doing your long run where the total amount of time moving is what you’re going after.
Structure
This is the big thing that I’ve seen amongst both trail runners and road runners is that very often you don’t make your easy day easy enough so that you can get the maximum benefit from the hard days. By doing too hard on your easy days it just means that you’ll be fatiguing your body so you wouldn’t be able to get the most out of your hard days.
By making your easy days out on the trail especially if it is a lead flattish trail where you can take your time and enjoy the scenery around you. It makes it that much more doable to get the pace of your easy runs down easy enough so that you can get the maximum benefit from your slow and easy days.
Technical Side Of Things
The problem with having so much technical data right on your wrist while running out in the road is that you can very easily be sucked into the mindset of trying to beat your workout as a competition which then, in turn, makes you go too hard on a day that you supposed to be taking it easy.
Because you’ve got this number in your watch of what the easy day supposed to be and you always want to just do that little bit better because of your competitive instinct.
Strength Training
The power nature of trail running will bring an improvement to the amount of strength and power that you have as a roadrunner after all it is your power that will be able to get you up and over the hills.
Elites Do Both
If you’d look at the top elite roadrunners what you’ll notice is that they do easily seventy to eighty percent of their run volume on trails simply because trails are soft underfoot which means that they can do a lot more volume without running the risk of getting injured.
While at the same time they get onto the road and onto the track to do the specific speed work sessions that they’re needing to do to make sure that they can keep their speed and pace up at a high level.
Often they do their run drills and specific technique exercises out on the track as well as opposed to the trail which has the possibility of tripping over stones and roots and tree branches and such like.
Have Fun
At the end of the day for all of us as recreational runners, having fun and enjoying ourselves out of our runs is the most important thing.
Yes, we’re getting healthy, yes we’re getting fit. But what is most important is that you’re having fun with our runs whether on the trail or road. Getting maximum enjoyment is what will help you get you out of the door with your shoes laced up ready for your next run.