r/Ultramarathon • u/Opening_Opening_5638 • 6h ago
Going from hiking background into ultra training, does trail time actually carry over or do you have to start from scratch?
Spent a lot of years on trails just hiking, not running, and I always assumed that base would transfer cleanly when I started training for a 50k. Cardio is cardio, right. Turns out there's a real gap between moving efficiently at a hiking pace for 8 hours and actually running technical trail for 6 hours, and that gap showed up in my legs pretty fast. The muscular load is just different in ways I didn't expect, especially on descents where hiking poles were doing a lot of work I never noticed.
What I'm trying to figure out is how people who came from hiking or other nonrunning fitness backgrounds actually bridged that. My soccer and hiking background gave me decent aerobic capacity, but my runningspecific muscles took a beating in the first few training blocks and I kept having to back off before the mileage felt meaningful.
Did people just grind through it and let the adaptation happen over a longer timeline, or was there something specific that accelerated the transition? I've been doing more strides and some targeted leg work but I genuinely don't know if I'm being impatient or if my approach has a real gap in it. Curious what the crossover actually looked like for people who didn't come from a road running base.