I’ve been extremely lucky to spend a lot of time this summer in Park City, Utah. Many world class runners make come here to train for altitude camps because you can drive 30 minutes or so in be in Salt Lake City or Provo which both are hot, but at elevations where runners can run workouts at paces much closer to sea level effort.
Observing the habits of these runners, there is one thing that is sacred: soft surfaces. Park City has tons of trails, but many of them are very hilly which are great if you are training for trail races, but only a limited amount of soft stuff that is flat-ish.
Accordingly, some of the best runners in the world will run endless loops around a soccer field for the entirety of an easy run or back and forth on the same few mile stretch of trail for hours just to avoid running on hard surfaces.
I usually am of the mindset that is it’s good enough for the best in the world, it’s good enough for me, but by no means am I recommending running around a soccer field for all of your runs. What we can take away from this is that there is a lot of benefit to mixing up running surfaces.
The research on whether or not this is beneficial is inconclusive, and I do think there is a place for doing a lot of your workouts and long runs for a marathon on hard road surfaces to prepare your body for race day. However, mixing things up and running on different surfaces can provide a little bit of relief when it comes to pounding if you are feeling beat up and actually go a long way in preventing injury by using different muscles in the lower leg and foot.
