I’ve spent the last 7-8 years mostly treading water from a fitness standpoint. My improved race performances have been driven by better execution of all the little things (pacing, nutrition, hydration, mental focus) and a general conditioning to the excessive pounding of long ultras. I got a little burned out from the relentless grind building up my endurance base to start out my ultra career and just stopped pushing myself once I reached a good enough level to complete them. Ultras have always been about finishing the distance rather than achieving a certain time or an overall placement. Sure I’ve had target times and expected outcomes, but those were more academic than anything else as I wasn’t putting in focused time and effort to improve them.
All of my “training” mileage has been super chill maintenance. No workouts or structured training plans. No strength training, cross training, stretching, or anything else outside running. I’ve just moved from one race to the next using the prior one as my primary training stimulus for the subsequent race. This has 100% worked for what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve periodically toyed with the idea of actually training, however nothing has ever motivated me to put in the effort to improve my fitness. My little mini-training block leading into ES100 this year has lit a fuse though and I’m now finally motivated to put in some work. No, make that a lot of work. And if I’m going to put in a lot of work, I need an appropriate goal to help motivate me. The larger the goal, the more motivated I’ll be to up my game. Something like. . .
Taking Down The King
I want to win 2027 The Last Annual Vol State.
Let’s just let that sentence sit there for a second by itself.
This is a very scary thing for me to admit publicly ahead of time. While I’ve won a couple races over the years, including this year’s HOTS 350, I’ve never been vocal about it ahead of time. Partly because finishing first (or top 10 or whatever) isn’t why I do these races, partly because I was never absolutely confident I could pull it off, yet mostly because I prefer to be more humble about my athletic abilities than loud and brash. I’m not putting this out there because I’m confident I can win. Far from it. I have no idea who’s going to show up or how fast anyone else will be able to run it. What I’m sure about though is that whatever the winning time is going to be is beyond my current capabilities. Most likely far beyond.
So it’s time to raise those capabilities.
[Note: the winner of LAVS is known as the King of the Road]
Training Framework
- Two workouts per week: Hills, Tempo/Speed
- Daily core work
- Weekly strength training
- Daily doubles to boost volume (judiciously)
- Two true rest days per week
- Reduced 1H27 race schedule
The first thing I’m going to do is add some intensity to my training via hill and tempo workouts. I might even start visiting my local track for speed work. My intensity level has been set on 1 forever. And when I mean 1, I’m talking about walking all the (very small) hills on my daily runs. Like every single one. Outside of some hill repeats heading into Eastern States each year, I haven’t done any workouts. There should be a decent amount of easy fitness gains here for me. The challenge will be finding workouts that I don’t completely hate and then scaling them as the year progresses. I’m confident I can figure this out.
I used to have a daily core habit, however that fell by the wayside pre-COVID. My current plan is 5-10 minutes each day. There’s a 15 minute Youtube video workout that I used to do and I’ll probably try to do that a couple times each week.
Strength training has been on my To Do list forever. I’ve started it a couple times over the years only to move away after a couple sessions or couple weeks at the most. This will likely be the hardest thing on my list to execute on as I have no track record of being successful here. The plan will be to start small, build a habit, then expand as the year progresses.
Daily doubles will be my path to increasing volume once I’m ready for that. I currently am able to get out for an hour walk each afternoon. I’ll look to swap a couple of those for runs so this will really be another way for me to increase intensity. I’ve done this periodically over the past year and it’s worked out well for me. This will also be my path to heat acclimation heading into the race as I typically do my runs early in the morning.
Guess what you don’t need when all of your runs are super low key easy. Yup, rest days. Upping intensity will create a need for true rest days so my body can recover. I plan to keep my run streak going, but at least two of the days each week will be the minimum one mile. As I’m planning on heading into the unknown from a training standpoint, I’ll be uber flexible on this and add in extra rest days when necessary. The ultimate goal here is to build my fitness up slowly over the next year, not tear it down in a serious of continuous minor injuries.
Probably almost as challenging for me to execute as strength training will be a reduced race schedule heading into LAVS27. I absolutely love pinning on a bib. Racing every month like I’ve done for the past couple years though doesn’t provide the time to actually do any serious training as it takes anywhere from 5-10 days to recover from a race. That leaves me with at most 1-2 weeks before it’s time to cut back volume the week before the next one. I had been planning to do Hellbender 100M next May, but that now gets pushed to 2028. The good thing is this dovetails nicely with my plan to add in more sub-100 mile racing next year. Hyner 50K and Worlds End 100K will be my tune-up races leading up to LAVS27, but nicely spaced out over the preceding 3 months.
This training framework is meant to be pretty high level. I don’t want to set hard and fast targets (i.e. fitness benchmarks, MPW, etc.) as I want to be flexible as I start my first serious training block in forever. The goal is to start small and scale up over the course of the year. I’ll look to do more of the workouts that I enjoy and less of those that seem like a complete chore. I do not want to get burned out.
While overthrowing The King is the tangible target that I’m aiming for, the true goal of La Revolución is to take my fitness to a whole new level. I’ve learned a lot about my body, motivations, and training over the past decade in this community and I’m excited to put it all together into a cohesive plan for improvement. It’s finally time to see what my body is truly capable of accomplishing.
Let’s GO!