Specific training sessions for fell, trail and ultra runners

This month, I’ve put together a round-up of my favourite fell, trail and ultra-specific training sessions…

It’s quite easy to find running workouts that help to build general running fitness - you’ll find this topic covered in plenty of articles, YouTube videos, Instagram reels and so on. Your running watch, or other training platforms might even suggest sessions for you! 

However, trail, fell and ultra-distance events require more than just basic running fitness.

You will often need balance, agility and skill to traverse technical terrain, good muscle strength and conditioning to cope with long and steep descents and uneven surfaces, and a very high level of fatigue-resistance if you’re targeting long events. Even if you’re not competing over ultra-distances, the challenging terrain of off-road events will generally mean you’re on your feet much longer than you would be on the road over the same distance.

Considering all these special factors, I’ve summarised some of my favourite running sessions for fell, trail and ultra-runners…

Fast Descending

This is one of my absolute favourite sessions, because it’s really effective, yet not overly challenging, meaning you can do it on a day when you’re already quite tired. It’s particularly helpful if you’re targeting events with a lot of elevation, long/steep descents, or more than 3-4 hours of running. 

This session simply involves simply running fast down a relatively steep hill. The steeper and longer the hill, the better, but you can also use shorter hills - you will just need to do more reps!

The goal of the session is to place a high ‘eccentric’ load on the quad muscles. This leads to a high level of muscle damage in the shorter term. You might experience DOMS or delayed onset of muscle soreness a day or two after the session. However, you will adapt quickly to this type of session, and with consistent fast descending training, you will see a significant reduction in the muscle soreness you get during hilly and/or long races. 

If you’ve ever experienced cramping in the quads, or muscle soreness during a race, then this will be a great session for you!

You’re best choosing either tarmac or smooth, hard-packed trail. This allows you to run faster, and also helps achieve higher loading on the quads with each stride.  

Start with doing roughly 5-10 mins of descending in total. This can be performed either as a continuous descent, or broken into shorter descents, walking or jogging slowly back to the top of the climb after each down-hill effort. 

As your strength develops, try to increase the total volume of down-hill running towards 20-mins.

This session can be included at any time in the season, but doing it once every 1-2 weeks is a good option particularly through the base training period, which is often in the winter. 

Technical Descending

If you tend to lose time on technical descents, then you’d likely benefit from some dedicated descending practice. 

To do this effectively, I’d recommend finding a technical downhill segment that’s just beyond your comfort zone - we don’t want to tackle anything that’s too challenging for your current abilities, but we want to stretch you a little. 

Perform repeats of this segment, walking or jogging easily back up the climb between repeats. You want to take the up-hill sections easy, so that you have plenty of oxygen flowing to your brain in order to focus on the descents! 

While descending, concentrate on one or more of these key technical pointers:

• Fast feet: Most (though not all!) technical descents are best traversed by taking fast, short steps. This allows you to land closer to your centre of gravity, so that if you slip or begin to roll an ankle, there is less lateral force through the foot, and you’re more likely to stay in control. 

• Lean forward: This sounds counter-intuitive when running down-hill and your natural instinct is often to lean backwards to slow down. However, leaning forwards also helps with keeping your centre of gravity above your feet, and means that if you slip, you’re much less likely to fall backwards! If you want to slow down, you can instead look for features in the trail such as rocks or firm roots that you can brace against with your foot to act like a brake. 

• Look ahead: Try to look far ahead down the trail, so you can see what’s coming up and choose a good line around any particularly tricky sections. This can also help with spotting short-cuts in fell races! Try to look at where you want your feet to land, rather than looking at obstacles you want to avoid, since focussing on the obstacles will tend to draw you towards them. 

• Use your arms to ‘fly’! Rather than adopting a usual running motion with your arms (elbows pumping backwards), it can be helpful to hold your arms away from your body and move them up and down to help keep balance. Here’s a nice video of Kilian Jornet descending - notice how he uses his arms on the technical sections to make small adjustments to correct his balance. The arms are not always symmetrical - he uses them independently to help stay upright. The added bonus of running this way is it’s also super fun, and you get to feel like a kid!

It can be helpful to have a mantra e.g. “fast feet” repeating in your head while you are descending, to help keep focussed. 

Racing is another good way to work on technical descending, since you will typically be less inhibited by fear of injury! Racing can really push your limits and help you to improve significantly. 

I’d recommend including a technical session like this 1x per week if you’re looking to improve your descending, or 1x per fortnight if you’re looking to maintain your abilities. 

Breakthrough Sessions

Finally, a great session if you’re looking to build your fatigue-resistance for longer events like marathons or ultras is what I like to call a ‘breakthrough session’. 

This is a long run performed at or close to race intensity. It should feel far harder than a regular training session, and will take longer to recover from. However, it can cause a big jump in your fatigue resistance, since it creates substantial muscular damage, which your body will adapt to. 

This isn’t a session you can do regularly (it would be far too mentally and physically demanding), but including a session like this once every 4-6 weeks in the build-up to a key race can be really beneficial. 

A motivating way to incorporate breakthrough sessions can be either to run with people who are a little faster than you, or enter a low-priority race, and use this as a training session. 

Depending on your ability level, and the length of event you’re targeting, you’ll want to aim for somewhere between 2-6 hours for your breakthrough runs.

That’s it for this month. Just a reminder that we have various resources available on our website, including the complete workout library, alongside various training plans. We also have some new resources in the making, which we hope to launch next month, so keep your eyes peeled for those!

Until next month, happy running!

Emma