[jenb]

Hi there,
I’m quite new to trail running – only 6months. I’ve done a 14km with 900m vertical gain, and have a 21km with 1,360m vertical gain coming up in 6 weeks. After that I’m looking to do my first ultra next year. I live in the mountains (the events above are all within 1hr of my house) – so vert is easy to find!

I’ve been training to distance so far and just muddling through and making mistakes on plans. I’ve just read TFTUA book and am looking to purchase a plan to train for the ultra next July – it will either be 50km or 70km but with mountainous elevation gain (depending on how my body is with the next 6 months of base training).

My main question is about training to time. I can understand it for the shorter workouts and training and can estimate my pace on flatter and less technical trails where i might repeat the same 2 runs every week.

But part of the fun of training to me is exploring new routes on the long runs. I know at the moment a 15km run with 900m of vertical can take me 3hours in zone 2 with decent trail conditions. But in muddy/wet conditions it could be closer to 4hours, or a different 15km with the same vert could be more or less technical and so 45mins longer or shorter. How do you then account for spending more or less time on your feet?

Can you adapt the next workout to be shorter to account for it? Or do you just work with how you feel the next day? I don’t want to just repeat the same trails or do out and backs as that’s not what’s made me come to love trail running.

Any advice would be appreciated as well as wondering if the intro to ultra or Luke Nelson’s plan (which says it can be suitable to mountainous 50km) would be better to start with.

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