u/Additional-Bet-6272

Hey everyone,
I’ve been dealing with what I think is proximal hamstring tendinopathy — pain high up in the hamstring where it attaches near the glute/sit bone area.
The strange thing is that it only shows up later in long runs. For example, during a 30 km run (trail or flat), it usually starts hurting around kilometer 20. On shorter runs I often feel completely fine, and in daily life I don’t really notice it at all.
At the start of April I got sick and ended up doing mostly very low-volume easy running for almost the whole month. During that period I wasn’t doing long runs, so the issue basically never appeared. But once I started increasing mileage and reintroducing longer runs again, the same pain came back in the exact same pattern — as soon as I go beyond roughly 20 km, it starts hurting. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the route is flat, uphill, or downhill.
I’d really like to hear from runners who’ve successfully dealt with this kind of issue, especially trail and ultrarunners. I’m interested in what helped with recovery, what kind of strength work made the biggest difference, and how people managed training while dealing with it.
I’m also curious about strength training for trail/ultrarunning in general. Excluding aesthetic upper-body training, what do you consider essential for performance and injury prevention, and how often do you train it during different phases of training?
Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been dealing with what I think is proximal hamstring tendinopathy — pain high up in the hamstring where it attaches near the glute/sit bone area.
The strange thing is that it only shows up later in long runs. For example, during a 30 km run (trail or flat), it usually starts hurting around kilometer 20. On shorter runs I often feel completely fine, and in daily life I don’t really notice it at all.
At the start of April I got sick and ended up doing mostly very low-volume easy running for almost the whole month. During that period I wasn’t doing long runs, so the issue basically never appeared. But once I started increasing mileage and reintroducing longer runs again, the same pain came back in the exact same pattern — as soon as I go beyond roughly 20 km, it starts hurting. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the route is flat, uphill, or downhill.
I’d really like to hear from runners who’ve successfully dealt with this kind of issue, especially trail and ultrarunners. I’m interested in what helped with recovery, what kind of strength work made the biggest difference, and how people managed training while dealing with it.
I’m also curious about strength training for trail/ultrarunning in general. Excluding aesthetic upper-body training, what do you consider essential for performance and injury prevention, and how often do you train it during different phases of training?
Thanks!

I feel like my biggest weakness in longer trail races is pacing.
Fueling and hydration are under control at this point. I take around 75g carbs/hour, around 800–1000mg sodium/hour because I’m a very salty sweater, and I drink consistently. No GI issues, no cramping, no real bonking symptoms.
The problem is that I genuinely don’t know how to distribute effort correctly over races lasting 5–7 hours.
In my most recent race (~28.5 km with a lot of elevation), my pacing was all over the place. Early in the race my HR was already in the high 170s/180s on climbs, and throughout the race I felt like I was constantly oscillating between pushing too hard and trying to recover.
What confuses me is that aerobically I often still feel “okay,” but the legs slowly fall apart and pace drops more than expected later in the race.
I recover well from hard training, tolerate moderate/high HR training fine, and I don’t think nutrition is the limiter anymore, so I’m starting to think this is mostly a race execution problem.
For people experienced with ultras or long trail races:
How do you actually approach pacing over 5–7 hours?
Do you:
strictly cap HR early?
pace entirely by feel?
use power?
intentionally stay way below what feels sustainable early on?
separate muscular effort from cardio effort somehow?
I feel like I still don’t understand what “correct effort” should feel like early in a long trail race, especially on climbs where pace becomes meaningless.

I feel like my biggest weakness in longer trail races is pacing.
Fueling and hydration are under control at this point. I take around 75g carbs/hour, around 800–1000mg sodium/hour because I’m a very salty sweater, and I drink consistently. No GI issues, no cramping, no real bonking symptoms.
The problem is that I genuinely don’t know how to distribute effort correctly over races lasting 5–7 hours.
In my most recent race (~28.5 km with a lot of elevation), my pacing was all over the place. Early in the race my HR was already in the high 170s/180s on climbs, and throughout the race I felt like I was constantly oscillating between pushing too hard and trying to recover.
What confuses me is that aerobically I often still feel “okay,” but the legs slowly fall apart and pace drops more than expected later in the race.
I recover well from hard training, tolerate moderate/high HR training fine, and I don’t think nutrition is the limiter anymore, so I’m starting to think this is mostly a race execution problem.
For people experienced with ultras or long trail races:
How do you actually approach pacing over 5–7 hours?
Do you:
strictly cap HR early?
pace entirely by feel?
use power?
intentionally stay way below what feels sustainable early on?
separate muscular effort from cardio effort somehow?
I feel like I still don’t understand what “correct effort” should feel like early in a long trail race, especially on climbs where pace becomes meaningless.