It’s not surprising to me that you would get a lot more drift running uphill, it’s a motion that most runners don’t do a “lot” of, or get truly good at.
I just did a lactate threshold test with a guy I’ve seen before. For anyone curious it’s with Jared Berg in Colorado, who runs his own lab now: https://www.insightnap.com/
He ran the CU Sports Medicine lab that I think a lot of people here went to. It fully ended at the start of covid.
This time I did it hiking uphill, but I’ve done running flat with him multiple times before.
Some interesting results were that my Z2 running goes to about 140bpm whereas my Z2 hiking uphill only goes to about 130bpm.
From some metabolic metrics like lactate, I could keep hiking faster, but for training purposes the muscular load is high enough that he said I should stick to 130bpm or just under.
He also said that metabolically I’m capable of cruising at 6:15min/mile pace running flat, but I simply am not that good at running, despite having been on cross country on and off growing up, and generally plenty of running.
So basically, when you take a pool of endurance athletes, I am way better at hiking uphill than running.
