Every sport has certain skills, or knowledge that are fundamental to the enjoyment of the sport. Learning these skills can sometimes be a painful process, take skiing for example. The transition from newbie to capable independent skier often follows a fairly set path, with different classes at ski school, colour graded runs to progress through and an obvious skill level to aspire to.
With trail running, there is no clear pathway to follow as you enter the sport and gain experience, but there certainly are essential skills that will help you progress from newbie, to becoming a capable and independent trail runner.
It is common to start running trails by accident, without consciously becoming a “trail runner”. Lots of people start out running on the roads, but then get curious, venturing into parks or woodland, working out where they are just by joining the dots between known places. Eventually your repertoire of route options grows and you just know where you are. That is all well and good, but it is a slow process and doesn’t help when you are away from home and want to get out for a run, or in the hills on a misty day.
The ability to look online or on a map and plan a route that is going to work, take about the right amount of time, have the right amount of hills, not involve crawling through brambles or getting shouted at by farmers is our first essential skill.
The first skill of route planning is useless unless it is also paired with the ability to actually navigate around the route that you have planned! With or without the help of GPS technology, recognising features and keeping track of your progress mean that you can focus on the running. Of course, working out where you are if it all goes wrong is a pretty handy skill too!
Some kit will just make your run more comfortable, the right shoes might give you more grip in slippy conditions and some kit will keep you alive if you have an incident out on the trails and you need to wait for help. Knowing what to carry on any given day is definitely an essential skill.
There is no doubt that running can be hard on your body and it is a sport associated with a lot of injuries. Daily good habits like a mobility warm up and actually using that foam roller that sits on a shelf can make a huge difference to how sore you feel after running. A thoughtfully prepared strength programme will also help reduce your injury risk and help you move better.
Watching someone run confidently down steep, slippy and technical terrain is truly a thing of beauty! The perfect physical expression of the complexity of the human body. It can seem like this level of downhill running somehow breaks the laws of physics, but if you break it down the individual elements aren’t that complicated and used with the appropriate level of pace and enthusiasm that your body can handle, you might find some flow!
You can learn all these skills and more on our Trail Running Essentials weekend.
We also have single day courses for:
Trail Running Scotland Ltd. Company registration number SC786843