Roc Trail: Course, Elevation & Route Profile

Course & Elevation

The start is on the Place de l'Église in the centre of Houffalize, the town the festival fills for the whole weekend. The opening kilometres climb out of the Ourthe valley; the first classified ascent comes at kilometre 2.1, 830 metres at five percent with pitches to 9.3.

The course then follows the ridges north-west of the town. The organizer places its feed points at Alhoument, Taverneux, Mont and Achouffe – and all four sit on this route, while the 10-kilometre loop reaches only the first. The loop out to Achouffe, home of the brewery that lends the festival its name, is what distinguishes the long distance.

Underfoot it is Ardennes forest: forestry tracks, singletrail and meadow paths, often still damp on a May weekend. With 43 percent uphill and 36 percent downhill but only 1.4 percent in the steep-uphill band, the profile describes a course with no real climbing test and no recovery either – an unbroken sequence of short undulations. The finish is at Cour-de-l'Abbaye, in the middle of the festival site.

Pacing Strategy

This course has no climb on which the race is decided, and that is exactly its difficulty: with 18 percent flat you never get a passage on which to recover. Run on effort rather than on split times – on undulating forest ground the splits swing by a minute per kilometre without your effort changing at all.

The trap is at the start. The first climb at kilometre 2.1 arrives before you are warm, and the field is dense in the narrow town centre. Push it at race pace and you will pay in the second half.

The run is decided between kilometres 9 and 14, where the course is furthest from Houffalize and the undulations come closest together, and on the trails out to Achouffe. In the wet, footing decides more there than form does. Take something at all four feed points – 25 kilometres off-road burns more than the distance suggests.

Training plan for Roc Trail: 12-week build

Reckon on two to three and a half hours. The effort is a continuous trail run in the upper endurance range with constant small intensity spikes – every undulation costs a few seconds above threshold, and there are a great many of them over 25 kilometres.

What decides it is the ability to run economically on uneven ground. Four hundred and forty metres of climbing is modest for a trail; what fatigues you is the constant change of stride length and surface, plus the eccentric load of 36 percent downhill.

So the emphasis is long runs off-road rather than on tarmac: two to three hours on forest tracks and trails, with descents run deliberately quickly. Add short uphill intervals of one to two minutes and ankle and core stability work – on technical ground that is the limiter, not endurance.

Early May in the Ardennes brings ten to eighteen degrees and frequent rain; the forest floor stays greasy for days afterwards. Run deliberately in the wet on similar ground, choose shoes with real lugs and test them under pace beforehand – and plan your fuelling, because a trail of this length takes two to three and a half hours depending on the weather.