Keen on outdoor activities that I am lucky enough to practice in the Alps, I opened a section in this blog dedicated to trail running, which I indulge in as a dilettante, far from popular races. As the section dedicazte to climate change and its consequences on living things, it offers unique content in the sense that it is made up of experiences and original ideas which I hope will inspire runners who will hopefully share comments.

Contents

• My motives for trail running
• Trailer equipment
  • Shoes
  • Running sticks
  • Clothes
  • Small equipment
  • Carrying and drinking system
• Before and after the trail
• The dilettante trailer technique
  • Support on the front of the foot is the basis of an effective technique…
  • …but not only…
  • To each their own pace
  • Become a quadruped
  • The rolling terrain step
  • The false flat step
  • The steep climb step
  • The steep downhill step
• For harmonious management of the trajectory
• Some additional advice

My motives for trail running

Over the years, trail running has become one of my favorite hobbies because contact with nature is at the heart of my needs, for the reasons explained in the Collebert section.

This activity enables to cover large distances on the least passable terrain which often turns out to be the wildest, and thus to discover new horizons beyond the beaten paths.

In the Alps where we rarely come up against the property limits which mutilate most of our anthropized spaces, our mobility and our imagination are both boundless. Thanks to the vertical dimension which makes our playground unique, I notice we have the privilege of living there in 3D.

The furtiveness of an activity practiced at a run pace offers the advantage of freeing up time for family life which too often competes with my passions.

Unlike the expanding mass of trail runners who are driven by competition, I practice trail running alone because I do prefer to compete against myself. Far from the crowd, I stay away from the increasing popular races.

This is how I am free to decide the time and place of my trails, which allows me to escape the dictatorship of time and place that everyone else suffers during their professional life where they depend on an agenda decded by others. Furthermore, I have the privilege of avoiding bad weather that a organization by others would impose on me.

I like the material sobriety of this democratic sport par excellence, since it is accessible to everyone regardless of gender, constitution or age. And this regardless of one’s income since trail running, which requires nothing else than a pair of shoes, relies only on the body and the mental.

On this last point, I noticed that running helps dissipate negative emotions by re-establishing fertile thinking which encourages the emergence of new ideas. This allows me to resolve a number of tricky situations and find out a positive outcome to most of those which appear to me to be dead end. I don’t know the reasonwhy of this providential process, but I know that relaxing virtues of running are correlated with the secretion of endomorphins which gives an addictive character to this activity to which we quickly become unwilling slaves.

Besides the previous motives, I am undoubtedly driven by unconscious animal impulses which come from our singular biological past marked by the pursuit over very great distances of prey which ensured our subsistence. In the light of recent discoveries, Chis Mc Dougal (Born to Run, Ed. Paulsen, 2022) explains how human species has specialized in hunting to exhaustion which has given an access to the meat necessary for growth of his brain. This adaptation dates from the intermediate period between when man became biped two million years ago and when he invented the spear two hundred thousand years ago. Among other predispositions, Homo Sapiens is advantaged by its hairless body able to sweat to cool itself, while its prey, handicapped by their hairy fleece, inevitably succumb to hyperthermia after long chase. By its extraordinary endurance in the animal kingdom, Homo Sapiens would have supplanted its close relative Neanderthal who was penalized by his strong hair coupled with a bulky corpulence. From there, modern man would have won the competition for protein food at a time when large mammals were becoming less and les common as the great glaciations arise. Runners by nature, we inherit the well-being that trail running provides, from this singular background which makes our species the champion of ultra-long-distance run.

Educated by this new knowledge, I was about to reconsider my reluctance to practice ultra-trail running which I wrongly suspected of being against nature and therefore harmful to the body. This was without taking in account a recent article which effectively validates this hypothesis for the particular case of extreme ultra-trails (Les springs de la performance en ultra-endurance, Le Monde, October 24, 2023). Beyond the 100 mile threshold, its authors (Nicolas Berger, Guillaume Millet, etc.) report a series of specific problems such as alterations of the locomotor and respiratory muscles, digestive disorders, renal complications and hypothermia. From there, they assume the distances traveled by our ancestors during exhaustion hunts were quite different from these extraordinary ordeals. I therefore décided to limit myself to distances below the critical threshold of 100 km, knowing that under this condition, lot of sources confirm undoubtely the benefits of running for the body and the mind. This is terefore a reason why hygienist motivations play a role in my passion for trail running.

To close the chapter of those which underlie my practice, I would mention one of the unsuspected aspect of this sport which consists in the pleasure of the gesture which I continue to develop over time. Focused on my postures and sensations, I discover by applying some principles that I had assimilated in hiking, nordic ski, rock climbing or mountain biking for example, there are many differenst ways to use your body to progress on trails. Because running potentially mobilizes all the muscles and joints in ways that vary depending on the context and the person, it is one of the most complex sports is and paradoxically the most banal. Today I get as much enjoyment from it as young children who experience the incredible mobility it provides, before being bored with it when they grow up.

When reading the excellent book of Chris Mac Dougal quoted above, the author mentions the quest of an eminent trail running theorist – Joe Vigil – who strived to unlock the secret of the success of the best. After eliminating all objective physical performance factors such as morphology, training or technique, he came to the counterintuitive conclusion that it is the psychological factors that make the difference, to the advantage of the female sex which performs well in ultra competitions. This point of view also differs from the theory of researchers who raise other hypothesis in the paper Le Monde, like nutrition or the quality of muscle fibers.

According to Joe Vigil, if pleasure and motivation are the keys to the success of trailers, I am glad to find in my practice as many motivations as those listed above. Needless to say that my modest level of performance is far below the one of most performers who take part to the increasingly less confidential world circuit of ultra competitions with, on the Mont Blanc tour for example, more than 4,000 candidates each year for 160 km and 10,000 m of elevation gain!

Trailer equipment