When trail runners meet in their top-secret forest enclaves and scheme ways to seduce road runners to join the dark side, one rule for conscription is clear.

"Don't tell them that trail running means hill running!"

After the cackling and backslaps end, a thousand calves and quads prepare to take a beating on the uphills and downhills that prove the undoing of many a flatlander.

"Hills are our friends!" insists longtime ultrarunner and instructor Mo Bartley to the hundreds of newbies she's trained in her trail running clinics. Bartley lives and runs in the Sierra foothills of northern California.

But how do runners living in geographies politely termed "hill-challenged" prepare for this temperamental friendship? These running rogues have devised wildly creative approaches to hill training that include elevators, rivers, mud, and even venison.

Myles Fennon lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and does most of his runs either along the flat East River path or in the gently rolling Central Park. When training for his first ultra, on Saturdays he ran over the George Washington Bridge, then raced up the Long Path alongside the Hudson River. Total trip: 35 miles and 7,200 feet of elevation change.

"But a lot of that was 50 feet up and 50 feet down," Fennon says.

So at home he ran up the emergency stairwell, 24 flights of his apartment building—six times—then, red-faced and drenched in sweat, rode the elevator down with his upscale neighbors. "You'd get some looks coming down," he says.

At his gym, Fennon used an "extreme treadmill" with incline dials inspired by the amplifiers in Spinal Tap.

"They went all the way up to 30 instead of 15," he says. But his favorite piece of equipment was the StairMill—which simulates an endless staircase.

Fennon was certain he was ready to tackle his first ultra in 2010: the 50-mile North Face Endurance Challenge at Bear Mountain. Instead he ended up with blown-out quads. "It was a rude awakening," he says.

So for his next attempt at an ultra, Fennon drove upstate two hours to Windham Mountain Ski Resort in the Catskill Mountains and ran for five hours. His actual hill training paid off, and he ran his first 100-miler—the 2012 Western States—in less than 24 hours.

Chris Roman lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and in 2010 was the butt of jokes at the Western States sign-in. "Florida, huh?" scoffed one official. "I bet you did bridge repeats."

He was right. Roman did bridge repeats. Sometimes over highways, and sometimes on a bridge over a local river. "That's a very common thing in Florida," Roman says.

Roman's favorite "hill" became Jacksonville's Hart Bridge, also known as The Green Monster. Roman ran the bridge for three hours, over-and-back up to 20 times. "It's really not that bad," he says, unconvincingly.

Roman's coach also introduced the tire drag. But tying an automobile tire to a weighlifting belt produced too much strain on his back, so Roman found himself at Home Depot struggling to explain to a nonplussed worker what he needed.

"Son, you need yourself a deer drag," drawled the Home Depot man.

"A what?" Roman asked.

"You never been hunting, boy?" jabbed the man. "You know how hard it is to drag a deer out the woods?"

Roman surfed Amazon looking for a deer drag with one thought in his head—"People are going to think I'm a total idiot"—and found a bright orange chest harness for dragging deer that he attached to a tire.

Despite the teasing at Western States check-in, Roman had the last laugh. Heading up the brutal climb to Devil's Thumb—the race's halfway point—Roman was side-by-side with a northern California native who trained on those very hills. The local watched in shock as Roman kicked into tire-drag mode.

"So you're from Jacksonville?" demanded the man. "I freaking live here, I run this course all the time and you're kicking my ass!"

Ultrarunning champion Geoff Roes—who splits his time between Boulder and Juneau, Alaska—shudders at the mention of treadmills or bridge repeats. "I don't think I could last more than 15 minutes on a treadmill," he says.

But Roes is also convinced that any kind of difficult terrain can help strengthen body and mind the way hills do.

"You can run through dense forest off-trail, muddy trail, extremely rocky trail, deep snow, loose sand, or anything which greatly minimizes the speed that you can comfortably run," Roes says. "This won't build your muscles in exactly the same way that running up and down mountains will, but you will be surprised how much they will improve your ability to run."

With all the options available to runners without hills, Roes jokes that the best solution for flatlanders is really a simple one.

"Just move."