How Much Vert Should You Actually Run?

Ask a runner how their training is going and they will tell you a number of miles. Ask them how much they climbed and most of them have to go look.

For a mountain ultra that is backwards. Mileage is the number that is easy to say out loud. Vert is the number that decides your race.

Mileage is the wrong headline

Two runners both put in 50 miles this week. One ran flat river path. The other climbed 9,000 feet. They did not do the same training, and if the race has 15,000 feet of climb in it, only one of them is preparing for it.

Distance measures how long you were out. Vert measures what the ground actually asked of you. On steep terrain your pace collapses, your heart rate stays high, your quads take a beating on the way back down, and none of that shows up in a mileage total.

This is why runners arrive at mountain races undertrained while looking, on paper, perfectly prepared.

Start from your race, not from a rule of thumb

There is no universal weekly vert number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. The right target is a function of the specific race you signed up for.

The anchor we use in HARDN is straightforward: your biggest training week should reach about 65 percent of the race's total climb.

A race with 6,700 feet of gain gives you a peak week near 4,400 feet. A race with 15,000 feet puts your peak week close to 9,800. The same runner, training for two different races, gets two different plans, because the mountain is what changed.

You never train the full race distance and you never train the full race vert. The peak week is the largest single week you build to, not a rehearsal of race day.

Why not 100 percent?

Because you get race day itself. Taper, adrenaline, crowds, a start line, and the willingness to hurt in a way you correctly refuse to in training. That gap is real and it is worth roughly a third. Training to the full number does not make you readier. It makes you injured.

The ramp

Knowing your peak number is the easy half. Getting there without breaking is the rest of it.

Four phases, each with a job:

• Base. Climb to around 40 percent of your peak week. The point here is tissue, not fitness. Tendons and connective tissue adapt far slower than your lungs do, and this is where that happens.
• Build. From 40 up to about 85 percent. This is the longest stretch and where most of the actual adaptation lands.
• Peak. The last 15 percent, held briefly. Two or three weeks, no more.
• Taper. Down through roughly 70 percent, then 30. You are not gaining anything now. You are arriving intact.

The shape matters more than any single week. Vert is not something you can cram, because the tissue that fails first is the tissue that adapts slowest.

Cut back every fourth week

Every fourth week, drop to around 60 percent of what that week was going to be.

This is the instruction people ignore, and it is the one that decides whether they make the start line. Climbing load accumulates in tendons and connective tissue quietly. There is no warning shot. You feel fine for six weeks and then your Achilles is a problem you will be managing for three months.

A cutback week is not lost fitness. Adaptation happens during the easy week, not the hard one.

Your biggest week is not your last hard week

Runners want the graph to rise smoothly to a peak that sits right before the taper. Good plans do not look like that. The largest week usually sits a little further out, with something slightly smaller between it and the taper.

That gap is where the work turns into fitness. Stack your biggest climbing week hard against race day and you carry the fatigue to the start line instead of the adaptation.

Getting vert when you do not live in the mountains

Most people asking this question do not have a 3,000 foot climb out the back door.

What actually works, roughly in order:

• Repeats on whatever you have. A 200 foot hill run ten times is 2,000 feet. It is monotonous and it is effective, and it is what most flatland runners who finish mountain races actually did.
• Treadmill at grade. Honest for climbing. Useless for the descent, which is half the problem.
• Stairs. Parking garages, stadiums. Excellent for gain, hard on the knees coming down, so take the elevator.
• Hiking with poles, on grade. You will hike large parts of your race. Training the hike is training the race, and almost nobody does it on purpose.

Weight the long day. It is easier and safer to put 4,000 feet into one long weekend outing than to spread it thinly across five weekday runs.

The half everyone skips

Every foot you climb is a foot you come back down, and the descent is what ends more races than the climb does.

Downhill running loads the quads eccentrically, which does more muscle damage than climbing. It is why your legs feel wrecked at mile 60 of a course you climbed comfortably, and it is not something you can fix with aerobic fitness.

The only preparation for descending is descending. If your vert plan is treadmill and stair repeats, you have trained one direction and you will find out about the other one somewhere around mile 40.

Measuring it honestly

Watch elevation is noisier than people assume.

GPS-derived elevation drifts, sometimes badly. Barometric altimeters are considerably better, which is why most serious trail watches have one, though they respond to weather as well as altitude. Two runners side by side on the same trail can come home with numbers hundreds of feet apart.

Two practical consequences. Compare against your own history rather than against somebody else's screenshot, because at least your error is consistent. And do not chase the last hundred feet of a weekly target when the measurement itself is fuzzier than that.

This is also why we score a week as met at 85 percent of target rather than 100. The target is a direction, not a line you have to land on exactly. A week at 3,800 against a 4,400 target is a good week, not a failure, and treating it as a failure is how people end up climbing on a leg that needed a day off.

The short version

Anchor to your race, not to a number you read somewhere. Peak at roughly two thirds of the race's climb. Ramp through base, build, peak and taper rather than jumping. Cut back every fourth week even when you feel good, especially when you feel good.

Train the descent, not just the climb. Measure against yourself. Get close to the target and stop.

The mountain does not care what your weekly mileage was.