There are two schools of thought about the differences between trail running and road running. One is that running is running: terrain and environment are minor details, and the best athletes in one discipline will probably also succeed in the other one. The other is that they’re two separate sports whose demands favor different characteristics. Drop Kilian Jornet into a road race or Emily Sisson into a trail race, and they’d be suddenly mortal.
A new study from French researchers at the University of Lyon, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, probes this question by bringing elite road and trail runners into the lab for testing. Actually, that’s not quite right—the researchers brought the lab to national-team training camps hosted by the French Athletics Federation for their trail and road-running teams. That meant using a treadmill that only went up to around 7:00 miles and 10 percent incline—modest challenges for athletes of that caliber. But the results still offer some interesting insights about the similarities and differences between top road and trail runners.
One longstanding question for both athletes and researchers is whether trail runners need to be more powerful. Bounding up…
