Three Important Workouts for the Ultramarathon

Audio Transcript

Hayley: Hey Runners Connect fans. Welcome to the Runners Connect, Run to the Top Extra Kick podcast.

Hope you guys are having a great day and thanks so much for tuning in. We have a great question from Nicola today about hilly ultra.

Nicola: I’m training for the 50-mile ultra-marathon with 12,000 feet of elevation. What are the three core training sessions to have each week?

Hayley: That’s a really great question, Nicola. For most of the ultra-runners, the main aim is to cover the distance.

With that in mind, once you get into the ultra-training, assuming there was sufficient base, so that’s strength work, mileage et cetera, I’d say the most important session was the long run.

The long run will get you used to the time on your feet, both mentally and physically, strengthen your muscles, tendons and ligaments to cope with race day, and give you an opportunity to practice eating and drinking on the run.

Many coaches suggest building up to 28 to 30 miles is a long run, though they don’t recommend further than this as the risks would outweigh the benefits.

During this long run, you practice eating on the go, whether that’s solid food or overlying mainly on gels, blocks, drinks, you can experiment with your race day kit and shoes, and just get used to being on your feet for a lengthy amount of time.

This run should be kept strong and easy with the aim being the distance covered rather than any particular pace.

It’s good to try and recreate the terrain that you’ll be running on race day. You mentioned that you have a lot of elevation in your race, so I’d try and find somewhere hilly for this long run.

As well as the standard once a week-long run, you want to consider including back to back long runs. This means doing a long run on consecutive days.

Often, ultra-runners use their weekends to get this in. It helps you get used to running on tired legs.

When doing the back to back long runs, I suggest 60% of normal long run mileage for the first run, the day before the scheduled long run.

Say you do 16 as your Sunday long run, you’ve run 10 on this Saturday, the day before, then you progress this, so the next week you might increase the day before for mileage by two miles and keep the next day long run the same.

The following week you might make the two mile increase to the long run and leave the day before run the same.

I’m not sure about your experience level. If you’ve completed a marathon and consider yourself to be fairly experienced, I suggest building the long run to 24 to 28 miles, and going up to 18 to 20 the day before.

You only need to do this maybe once, but it should give you a good confidence boost that you can cover the distance.

Obviously, take a lot of recovery before and after this block.

Whilst I can suggest the other techy sessions, ultra-running is ultimately a case of building up your mileage and with this in mind all the general runs you do in the week, all your easy mileage is super important too.

The mileage helps to prepare the structural system for the demands of the race.

When you increase the mileage, I suggest incorporating down weeks, every three to four weeks.

Your highest mileage in the ultra-marathon training will likely be 30% to 50% higher than your highest marathon training week.

Once your performance is higher, you want to lower the intensity of your workouts adding two stresses, because both volume and intensity at the same time, is a recipe for injury.

I’d keep the workouts to the marathon pace range.

However, running isn’t the only thing you need to do. I suggest adding a running specific strength routine, that’s also really key.

You want to include core work as well as hip and glute strength to help your body handle the increased training loads and the longer runs.

Given that your race is hilly, you also want to make sure that you account this new training, since hill sprints and hill repeats aren’t very specific. Of course that you still do have that place, I’d say that a core workout for you to include would be a rolling hills run.

You can incorporate rolling hills into a threshold run or a longer run.

Incorporating hills into a normal workout teaches you how to run them on race day, where you’ll encounter gradual and longer hills during the course of the race.

It teaches you how to keep your form and effort under control once running on under related terrain and how to pace yourself up and over them.

Running hilly ultra is all about practice and building the foundations, training volume and strength to go the distance.

Just make sure that you also practice fuelling for the race day as that’s so important too.

You want to know what sits well with you and doesn’t cost you stomach issues, but gives you enough energy to get you through.

Best of luck with your training. Your first 50 miler is super exciting. A tough challenge, but it’s going to feel so rewarding once you’ve nailed it.

That was a really great question, and thanks so much for asking.

For those of you listening that want to have your question answered by one of the Runners Connect coaches, head over to runnersconnect.net/daily and click the record button to send your question over.

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Hope you enjoyed today’s episode and have a great run today.