Ultra Training for a Novice – there’s no going back now!

Back in the autumn, feeling strong after all my lockdown running, I signed up for my first ultra marathon. The Vale of Glamorgan Ultra follows 40 miles of the Wales Coastal Path, from Porthcawl to Penarth, a beautiful route and, being local, one with no logistical issues to worry about. I had nine months to train, and lots of fellow novices as 12 people from my running group had also signed up. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, losing nearly three months of running to a stress fracture, followed by a very, very slow and gentle reintroduction to running wasn’t exactly ideal. Nine months of training turned into six, building up from just 1 flat mile instead of the 13 hilly ones I’d been doing pre injury. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little voice that sometimes asked if this was really a sensible thing to do, but that little voice wasn’t so different to the small child repeatedly asking for ice cream, and I knew what to do with that. “We’ll see” isn’t really an answer, but it at least stops the questioning for a while.

I’ve never been one for formal training plans. There’s too much chance of life getting in the way, turning a plan into yet another source of anxiety rather than the aid it’s supposed to be. Instead, I went for small goals to tick off: managing a full 5 mile Bay loop; noticing when running started to actively help my leg feel better; running up a hill, and best of all, running back down one. None of this was ultra training, I still wasn’t mentally committing, but I was getting closer to it every time. Then at T minus three months I made it back into Penarth. Mentally that was huge, I’d got myself out of Cardiff and was starting to get some real distance in my legs. Time to accept that I really was going for this, and with that acceptance surely some element of planning would be sensible.

To my way of thinking, training of any sort breaks down into two areas: how do I get my body to achieve what I need it to do, and how do I fuel it so as to reach that goal safely? In other words, output and input.

Output

My structure has been deliberately simple: three runs a week, one of them long, and getting steadily longer as the weeks go on. It hasn’t been entirely linear – my half marathon with a friend accidentally became 14.5 miles, so I dropped back down to 12 after that – but while the distance line on the graph might be bumpy it’s definitely heading in the right direction.

But there’s more to it than simply increasing distance, I also need to look at how I run. There is no chance that I’m going to run every step for 40 miles of coastal path, so the training needs to mirror that. I need to learn how to stop and still be able to start again, how to notice when 60 seconds of power walking will refresh me rather than pushing through to keep running and risk not being able to finish. I’m learning how to spot that tiredness, thirst or hunger is going to hit, and making adjustments before it happens so that I can keep going.

Keeping going is an awful lot easier than picking yourself back up again, but I suspect I’ll need to do that too, and this one really is a head game. I find myself thinking back to my days before running, before children, and long, hard days out in the mountains. I have no doubt that this race will do just the same as some of my hardest climbs, stripping back all the layers we build over ourselves, all our protections and safety measures, until only the rawest version of our self is left. There is no hiding then, nowhere to go other than to get to the end. That exposure, that we spend so much our lives avoiding, is overwhelming when it comes. But it’s exhilarating too. I’ll know then that I’ve hit my hardest point, that it can’t get worse, that by simply putting one foot in front of the other I can keep going, and I will finish.

Input

Of course, none of that works unless our bodies have been fuelled properly, and after my brush with REDs (Relative Energy Deficiency in sport) I’m not taking any chances. I’m experimenting with different foods during a run (current favourites are Anita Bean’s raw energy balls, and cold new potatoes), and I’m making sure I eat before I get hungry, to ensure my energy levels don’t dip too much.

I’m also taking notice of the ‘calories’ stat on Strava. It’s simple common sense that the longer the run the more calories we burn, but seeing that figure written down has made me sit up and really appreciate it. My standard Bay loop can add the equivalent of a whole extra lunch to my calorific needs for the day; the 16 miles I ran yesterday almost doubled my daily need. These are not insignificant amounts of food, but it takes thinking about to properly replenish those stores, both before and after a run, and it gets harder as the distance increases.

Final steps

With a little over 8 weeks to go I’m finally allowing myself to think seriously about this race that has been on my mind for so long. I even got as far as planning weekly distances for the remaining training time, but I think that was really only to make me feel a bit better about it as I haven’t stuck to it yet! But the basics are working: my distances are growing, I’m fuelling well, and above all else I’m enjoying the training. That seems like the right place to be.