Hilly vs Flat Marathon Training – The Mistake Most Runners Make

Why Flat Marathons Feel Harder Than
Hilly Races
Watch, listen and read the full episode here
[00:00:00] In this video, you’re gonna learn how to train for a flat marathon course so
you can run faster, avoid fatigue, and maximize your performance on race day. And
I’m also, as a bonus, gonna be touching on how to pace a flat marathon without
burning out the best long run strategy for a flat course. Why flat races feel harder
than hilly?
[00:00:17] Ones Starting runs earlier and a bunch more.
[00:00:20] I’m Darren D. Lake Runs, sub three hour marathoner, 10 hour Ironman
finisher. And I am all about being 1 percent better habitually every day with running,
life, et cetera, and helping you out with all these tips and tricks. Let’s get into it.
[00:00:34] got a message from Adam who
[00:00:35] I’ve done a whole episode with. We ran with him. We talked about habits
and consistency. You can check that out up here. And he hit me up and he was like,
yo, Darren, I have been doing this hilly run for a while.
[00:00:48] My heart rate’s high. I’ve got a flat course coming up. I don’t know. How
should I do it? The hills obviously make me stronger, but.
[00:00:55] They’re also topping me out and I’m starting to redline with my heart rate,
et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, all right, cool. So I basically ran down a whole
bunch of kind of bullets that I said at the beginning, and I’m going to go through
them quickly with this and we’ll get kind of to each point.
[00:01:09] And I decided, I was like, look, if I’m going to help him, I might as well
help you because I’m sure everyone’s got different courses that they can train on
and then they can race on totally different courses. So I’ll just jump right into the first
point, which is why training for flat is different.
[00:01:22] Flat courses require sustained effort and there’s no natural breaks from
hills.
[00:01:28] So that’s like one area that if you believe in the principle of specificity, or I
call it the law of specificity, you need to do the thing. You need to practice the thing
if that’s going to be your main race. So if you’re running on a trail and it’s undulating
up and down hills, then you need to be doing a trail run, undulating hills,
[00:01:47] as much as you can, or run on grass, or, you know, like do a.
[00:01:51] Treadmill if you have to and constantly change the terrain or get one of
those kind of pre programmed things in the treadmill So the goal is to do what the
course is obviously running hills is gonna make you stronger for flat But kind of gets
to the next place that if you’re always training on hills and it’s constantly changing
you might get mentally bored Running hills And physically fatigued from the
constant pace.
[00:02:11] This happens a lot with cyclists. This happened when I did my Ironman
and people would train on hilly courses so they can kind of get up, rest, you know,
different types of positions. But what happens is you need to be in those flat bars.
And this is a bike analogy for 180 kilometers, five, six hours, and you get bored, you
get tired, your back hurts.
[00:02:30] So it’s the same with running. If you’re constantly running on flat
pavement and you’re not used to it, you’re going to get. going to be using muscles
very long and even your brain is going to get tired. So you need to practice and train
on the course at least, six to eight weeks out if you can.
[00:02:45] So that’s one and two, which is why training for flat is different and
course specific training. The marathon that we have coming up, which I’m
[00:02:52] actually pacing Brenton, who I did an episode with to do his sub three
first sub three hour marathon with in hopefully a few months whenever this gets
released, but it will 90 meters, which I think is about 270 feet, which is extremely.
[00:03:10] I mean, maybe the beach, uh, beach up and down is going to be flat on
that. So the Sydney Marathon, I live in Sydney, Australia. I’m obviously American,
but I’ve been here 13 years. The Sydney Marathon is very, very hilly. I think it’s the
hilliest major marathon. So this runner, Adam, is trying to train for both.
[00:03:27] The Ballarat Marathon in April and then the City Marathon in September.
And I was like, you need to pick one, you need to focus on the one, the main one
that’s coming up. Another thing we talked about, or I gave him kind of advice on,
[00:03:39] which was adjusting the training load. So flat running equals steady
pacing. Unlike hills where effort varies, obviously you want to avoid pace drift. So
slight pace changes affect your endurance. Obviously, if you’re going uphill,
[00:03:53] your pace will actually go down.
[00:03:54] And then when you go downhill, your pace goes up and then your heart
rate goes down. So even though it’s like, yeah, I guess it evens itself out.
[00:04:00] So you need to get used to just running along at your marathon pace for
20, 30 Ks.
[00:04:05] What’s that? Uh, 12, 20, 15 miles, 20 miles, depending on how advanced
you are before the race, weeks before the race. But you need to be able to do that
and train
[00:04:15] your muscles, your joints, your ligaments, they all will be used to
whatever you’ve been training to. You don’t want race day to be new.
[00:04:21] Yes, you’ve done the kilometers and yes, you’ve done the miles and
you’ve done the time on your feet, but you need to have done the terrain. Treadmills
can help if you don’t have it or you can simulate in a lot of different ways. Which
leads to my next point, the science behind flat course fatigue. So there’s heart rate
variability in Hills versus steady state on flat.
[00:04:40] You need to sort that out early. Stride length also changes and your
cadence changes. So when you go uphill, you probably have a shorter stride length.
And then when you go downhill, you might have a longer one and you might have a
lower cadence when you go downhill and a higher cadence when you go uphill.
[00:04:53] And that will mess with your brain. That will mess with your, your
muscles. Like they’re all like used to a certain way. In the race. It’s like, this is
different. You can’t have that.
[00:05:01] And this is to the next point. Adjusting the running plan. So this is like
how he does it.
[00:05:06] And I basically said he needs to do more loops of whatever flat area. So
he has a problem where he lives in a very hilly area. I’m sure a lot of people have
that problem here in Sydney. It’s kind of hilly, kind of flat. I always know where, if I
want to do flat, I can go here. If I want to do hills, I can go here.
[00:05:20] And it does take some preemptive thinking. You have to go, okay, what
am I doing today? What course can I do this on? And, So you have to go out, you
know, ride your bike or run over and check out the area, drive if you have to and
check the area out. And Google maps has elevation Strava. You can plan your
route.
[00:05:37] And you could see the elevation and then you can plot it out. So you can
have a one mile out and back. It’ll just be a line. That’s fine. It’s absolutely fine.
Obviously the longer the better. He likes to do really pretty loops and I like them too.
[00:05:49] I’m a big fan of loops, but sometimes I’m like, no, I just need to do an
outback or you know what, I need to do this weird kind of thing here and then come
here and then come here. Like, and he actually did that on the next run. And I’ll
hopefully
[00:05:59] we’ll have a little map of how it is and what he did. But you just have to
do that.
[00:06:04] You have to adapt your training and the map’s not going to be pretty and
the run might be boring, but But guess what? You actually will find that looping
things and having points and knowing where things are will help you on those
longer runs and those harder, faster runs. I’ve found, especially when you’re getting
into kind of marathons that have two or three loops, you actually know like, all right,
this is the point where I do this.
[00:06:25] All right, this, I’m getting tired. I know how to do that.
[00:06:27] Can actually mentally mind map it and it helps you understand. Whereas
if you’re doing one big loop in like a marathon, like most marathons on one big loop,
every single. mile is brand new and your brain, if you’ve never done that course,
most likely you haven’t done that course.
[00:06:41] The course has changed. Even if you have every single year, you actually
know the point if it’s loop. So doing the loops actually gets you ready for the
training, possibly not the marathon, but at least you’re doing the terrain. So you
want to find loops or some sort of an out and back or some sort of a new course
that is flat
[00:06:58] and you could save the hill training for races that demand it. So again,
we’ve got city marathon, which is the hilliest major.
[00:07:05] the city is extremely hilly.
[00:07:07] So this leads to One of the last points which is over training and
overreaching now a problem that he might have is that while overreaching is what
you?
[00:07:15] Want overreaching is fatigue, but you get gained so it’s pushing your
body to the limit So it stresses itself and then it rebuilds but over training is a full
blown thing and you don’t know because they both are very similar. And the reason
why this is related to what he’s doing with his heart rate going up in the Hills is that
him pushing his heart rate, Adam five to 10 BPMs on average for two, three hours
month on month, you know, he wants to do this for a couple of years.
[00:07:44] Like he’s going to be burning himself out and he’s going to be, touching
more overtraining and possibly get overtraining syndrome, which I had, which was
horrendous. And I’m going to do an episode on that overtraining syndrome was I’ve
had it twice. It is no bueno. You, I had a mild case of it and I couldn’t get my heart
rate over zone two for two months, or I felt like trash.
[00:08:04] I was waking up four or five times a night having to pee. My sympathetic
system, nervous system was in absolute shock, which destroyed my power
synthetic, which is the relaxing sympathetic is the fight or flight. And they basically
were just like, no. And this is the kicker with overtraining versus overreaching.
[00:08:18] This is why they’re both very similar is that overtraining looks like
overreaching. And you actually have this bump for, I think it’s like up to a week or
two that I had and everyone has. And I’ve read about it, but it’s like, your
sympathetic system takes over and you actually get like this amazing rush and you
actually feel really good for a week and you’re like, Oh, your times you’re killing your
times and everything.
[00:08:41] So then you train even harder. That’s the crazy risk of overtraining is that
you end up putting yourself more into the hole and then it’s done. I was two months
out. I know some people that have been. Three to six months ago that I was
coaching a cyclist and some pros get six to 12 months of overtraining syndrome.
[00:08:57] And the thing about overtraining syndrome,
[00:08:59] it’s like a recession. You don’t know it until it’s, it’s happened. So they
don’t call recessions until the recession has happened. Overtraining syndrome. You
don’t know it until you have it. So it’s not like one of those things like, I think I’m in
overtraining.
[00:09:09] It’s like, no, you will have it. And you need to go to an, a exercise
physiologist, someone that can check out your endocrine system ,
[00:09:15] you don’t want this. Cause then if you, if you go to overtraining
syndrome, you can’t train for your marathon.
[00:09:20] And then guess what? You’re not going to get faster. So the whole point,
this is kind of like, don’t die. And this is the whole, don’t do any harm. You know,
rule number one, like don’t hurt yourself to where you can’t
[00:09:28] Show up 1 percent better each day to be consistent, to be habitual, to
get better increment, step by step incremental increment. And then that’s how you
get better. But if you take two months off, three months off where you just back
everything down, you don’t get better.
[00:09:40] So to kind of wrap up the overtraining overreaching quarters of level
shoot up disrupt the sleep stress free radicals They all get released and they just
wreak havoc on your system You don’t want that you want to stretch your body out
a little bit recover Come back a day or two later stretch your body out a little bit
recovered Take every three weeks take one week off or every four weeks every two
weeks, whatever you need So adjust your intensity and volume to stay in that sweet
spot so that you can get the gains forever
[00:10:04] And the last thing is about training in the heat. So he actually, Adam likes
to go out about 8 30 AM,
[00:10:11] and I see that now we’re in the middle of summer and it’s very hot where
he is cause he’s down in Melbourne.
[00:10:16] And he’s fighting the hills and the heat. We obviously can’t take away the
heat, but we can try to train earlier. So I offered the suggestion of, Hey, why don’t
you just get out early? 6 o’clock, 530 if you can, when the sun is not even out, when
the sun is low below the earth or very, very low and it’s not heating up and the
temperature outside is I think yeah, 20, 21 degrees in the mornings Celsius, which is
about 67 degrees Fahrenheit, which is way better, way better than going out at 830
and the temperatures already got up to 26 degrees Celsius, 27 degrees Celsius,
which is already in the low 80s.
[00:10:50] And that can help his heart rate stay lower. He can get better high quality.
volume out of his training, better high quality sessions out of his training, and he can
train better and he can start gauging. Is he ready? Can he adjust his paces? Can he
go a bit faster, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:11:04] So paying attention to effort, is another thing and not really paying
attention to heart rate is what I suggested. And heart rate is great when you’re
starting out. It’s a great governor. You have like kind of a upper and lower limit. But
the problem is, is that You have so many variabilities with heart rate that looking at
that only metric, it can mess you up.
[00:11:22] Pace is great, but if you have a hilly course, pace is going to mess you
up. They have the gap, the great adjusted pace time on Strava, but even that it’s
like, unless you have a Coros, you don’t get that real time. So you got to see it
afterwards. So my whole thing is power.
[00:11:34] And I’d actually did an episode on power up here and training with power
and a power meter, not the Garmin power meter.
[00:11:40] I think Coros has power meter also. But in actual stride power meter, S T
R Y D no E at the end. And it is phenomenal because it actually validates my effort.
So effort is like, Oh, this needs to start at a five out of 10 and then end at a seven
and a half out of 10. And I need to validate that with power.
[00:11:59] My Watts, I’m looking at my watch cause I’d see the Watts and it’s like,
what are my Watts for this lap? And you need to do a, uh, it’s kind of like an FTP
test of sorts, like a functional threshold power test.
[00:12:09] So similar heart rate zones, but I really like power.
[00:12:11] So it’s a bit more advanced, but if you want to just validate everything
against heart rate against elevation and all that, and just know like, I need to do a
seven out of 10. And I need the power to be seven out of 10. Boom. That’s how I
know that
[00:12:23] so that was a lot went over small changes with effort, validating power,
[00:12:26] and then changing up to run earlier, overtraining versus overreaching.
[00:12:31] key adjustments in the running plan. So doing more looped runs and flat
courses and changing how he trains and the type of terrain that he trains on, or at
least the, the map, the science behind flat course fatigue, adjusting training load
and course specificity. And the whole why training is flat and different versus hilly
courses and why we should do that.
[00:12:52] Let me know if you got any questions. I’m all about helping people and
I’d love to help anyone out there. There’s a link below if you want to get at free
habits, download and base training guide.
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help you perform and live 1 percent better in your running life. Thanks for rocking.
Peace.