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Power hiking as active recovery for runners

This is an excerpt from The Art of Ultrarunning by Ian Sharman.

Ever since I started running I’ve enjoyed the varying challenges of trails and roads, not focusing exclusively on one or the other for too long. After a 2016 season mainly running 100-mile trail races, I wanted to try a road marathon, but ideally something different. A new series of downhill marathons from a company called Revel took my fancy, and I picked the Mt. Charleston Marathon ​outside of Las Vegas, set for late April 2017. It involved just over 5,000 feet of downhill with a few minor bumps for uphills, starting at altitude at over 7,500 feet. In comparison, the Boston Marathon is a net downhill course, and the finish is just 450 feet below the start.

Downhills have always been my favorite part of running, especially on technical mountains, so this seemed like the ideal chance to run faster than I ever had before and see what I could learn from it, too. I didn’t know anyone who’d even tried a race like this, so the training and race-day experience were bound to be eye-opening and useful for future coaching and my own racing.

Winter running was just starting to ramp up and didn’t feel particularly great. Then in early March I suffered an annoying right calf injury during a short, local, 10-mile race that meant I couldn’t run at all, just seven weeks out from race day. I saw numerous specialists and got multiple forms of body work to see if they could alleviate it, but it stubbornly wouldn’t improve. The act of pushing off the toes from the ground was agony, so I couldn’t run a step. Luckily, I could walk fast, even uphill, without any pain, so I pivoted my training in that direction.

I knew from theory and experience that walking, especially fast, is excellent exercise, so I hoped I could maintain fitness while I healed. For longer ultras, power-hiking is essential since almost everyone will need to hike some sections. Yet I expected to lose some fitness if I couldn’t run too. In March I did around 35 hours of hiking in the three weeks after the injury—around the same volume I would have done running, but much shorter mileage. Every time I hiked I did so at a brisk pace, and I did reps on the butte I lived on, roughly a 550-foot climb in a mile. For much of this hiking I used a 20-pound weight vest to help keep my legs strong and get any possible additional adaptation for the pounding I’d receive from the relentless downhill course.

In late March I could feel the calf injury improving, but still not enough to run at all. I was entered for the Los Angeles Marathon as a training run prior to the Mt. Charleston Marathon and had already paid for the trip, so I decided to treat it as a pure power-hiking race, something I’d never considered doing in a road race. Instead of lamenting that I couldn’t run it and would miss training, I wanted to see if I could maintain a strong, relentless hiking pace the whole way through. I also treated it as mental training to change the purpose of the race from a training run to a chance to do something I’d never usually opt to do if healthy. It was an opportunity, not a defeat. I had a surprisingly good time and enjoyed the challenge of hiking as fast as I could without fading, taking 5 hours and 45 minutes.

The following week at the end of March was an athlete summit for my shoe sponsor at the time, Altra, in Zion National Park. At this point I was able to try some tentative running, but I mainly stuck to hiking. Halfway through the summit, the group decided to cover most of the Zion Traverse route through the park, a 48-mile adventure run. Our route included 36 miles of the whole trail, and I was able to keep up with the group because they moved at a gentle pace, only having to run a few short, flatter sections. I was amazed how strong my legs felt and started to get more optimistic that the Mt. Charleston Marathon would still be feasible.

In early April I had another local 10-mile trail race, one I’d run several times before. Race week I ran most days but also kept the regular weight-vest power-hiking to transition without ramping up too fast postinjury. All I hoped for was to be able to push and have the calf behave. To take the pressure off, I ran in an old Spider-Man costume I’d used for marathons in the past and kept my expectations low. Somehow I ran my fastest time ever at the event, suggesting I was faster and fitter than usual for this early point in the season.

That left a couple of weeks where I could run unhindered before tapering for the marathon. I kept up some minimal weight-vest hiking in place of running, covering a few miles a couple of times a week to avoid too sharp an increase in running volume. Things felt good, and it didn’t feel like the few weeks limited to hiking had held me back at all.

I didn’t know what to expect from the downhill marathon because it was too unlike anything I’d ever done. I felt in decent marathon shape, but the upended training suggested I’d have to be careful to avoid trashing my legs from so much high-impact speed. I was fairly certain I’d finish under my standard marathon best time due to the insane course, although the pace and finish time were very unpredictable.

When I turned up to the race, I tried to put things in the right context of less-than-ideal training to temper my goals. It started in the dark, well below freezing and with some ice on the road due to the high altitude . . . not something I’d expected next to Vegas. Because the course altitude dropped so fast, the cold start quickly switched to comfortable running weather as the sun rose. I was flying, faster than I’d ever dreamed I could run, and the mile markers went by with my watch telling me splits I could barely believe. The run went just about perfectly, and I smashed my fastest marathon time by 11 minutes in 2 hours and 21 minutes, running much quicker splits than my 5K, 10K, and half-marathon best times from flat races.

I didn’t quite know what to make of this at the time. The biggest takeaway was that power-hiking training can, at the least, maintain fitness very well. By sticking to fast power-hiking, including hills, and adding in the extra leg and core strengthening from using the 20-pound weight vest, it seems I may have even continued to gain fitness while recovering from injury. Of course, power-hiking through an injury isn’t always possible, but it didn’t just improve the ability to hike. It spilled over to running fast and building durability to minimize the muscle damage from hard racing.

More Excerpts From The Art of Ultrarunning

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