Why Trail Running Is Better Than Road Running

For all my new friends running in the Diablo Trails Challenge on April 20 and new runners everywhere.

Naturally, DTC is a trail event – but as you train up for the event, whichever distance you have chosen, you’ll need to choose between working on trail or tarmac, perhaps with some treadmill thrown in.  :-)

Today we’ll start a two-part look at trail running vs. road running in a comparison along four axes: surfaces, sounds and sights, slopes, and safety.  I’m going to tip my hat a bit here and tell you that I think trail running is better for a number of reasons.  But you knew that!  :-)

While you’re training for the Trail Challenge, be sure to run plenty of trails.  If you’ve built a marathon base on roads, that’s great.  But you will want to do trail work to get ready for the cross-over.  And since trail running has so much going for it, once you make the transition you might not want to go back.

So, most folks started as road runners, high-school track runners, treadmill runners, and/or run-in-the-park runners.  There’s plenty good to say about running in those places.  The only problem with those running venues is that they don’t have the benefits of the trail.  Let’s look at each area:

• Surfaces:  Pavement is generally unvariegated, smooth, and hard.  The unforgiving hard surface has a distinct lack of variation.  Worse, often a paved road has a camber to it since the center line of the road is crested to cause rain to naturally run off to the shoulders.  So road running often puts the legs in the unnatural position for an extended time of running with the left leg slightly uphill to the right leg.  That’s not great.
  
  Just like slopes, you want a variety of surfaces.  More specifically, it’s good to run on softer surfaces and on trails and paths.  But you also want uneven ground.  Trails, whether fire-trail or single-track, have a nearly infinite variety of angles, ruts, grooves, mini-potholes within the trail itself, causing your joints and muscles to constantly react to the changes.  And the systems that get involved are not just in the legs – also your abs are enlisted for core support, the arms and shoulders for balancing, the neck to keep the head level, etc.  On pavement, you won’t receive all these benefits as thoroughly.
  
  
• Sounds and sights.  City running has great views of, well, buildings, roads, busses, traffic – you know, cities!  And the back country of the Bay Area offers matchless vistas of our mountains, the ocean, the bay, the streams and creeks.  At nearly every turn, our chapparel, oak forests, wetlands … it’s unparalleled.

Next time, we’ll continue with slopes and safety.