How do you prepare someone for the Arizona Monster 300? A 309 Mile Ultramarathon…

Exactly a year ago, I started working with a client who came to me to help them get ready for the inaugural Arizona Monster 300 - a mind bending 309 mile ultramarathon.

It’s these kind of events that I absolutely love the challenge of having to think about.

So, how do you actually go about coaching someone to run 309 Miles over the space of a few days?

In short - you can only coach the person, not the distance.

When presented with these kind of distances, it can be too easy to lose sight of the fact that you are training a person - not a distance.

What I mean by this is that old school programming would probably dictate very large weekly running mileage for this kind of thing - and most of it easy miles - without really taking much consideration for what would actually move the needle for that person in a better way.

Once you’ve performed a bit of a needs analysis, you’ll know what the gap is for that person.

This is the approach I take with all my coaching clients, regardless of what they are training for.

In the world of Hybrid, you also have to account for the different types of athlete you might encounter.

Being able to look at their long term training history and make the best assumptions that you can about their physiological make up, will help you to know what the priorities are for that individual regardless of the desired outcome they are training for.

Yes, traditional training plans will usually say 80/20 or 90/10 in terms of the intensity distribution, and something arbitrary for a hybrid version like lift weights 3 times a week.

But.

You can get down into much more granular, tangible areas to find big progressions that are relevant when you understand what levers you need to pull to affect change for that person.

Things like, how do you design training sessions for them if they need to maximise their aerobic capacity without fatiguing them too much?

How do you change where their VT1 (Ventilatory Threshold 1) kicks in on their lactate curve - and, when they are between their VT1 - VT2 (Lactate Threshold) how do you make that energy system as efficient as possible for them, rather than being a burden?

Are there some potential outside benefits to identifying and training their limiters (whether it’s respiratory, delivery or utilisation limitations) that they might present with, alongside all of this?

And finally -  how do you go about dosing their strength training, which should be in a concurrent nature, taking into account that you don’t want to undo all the above by adding excessive fatigue to people who are already, or are not, from a strength training background.

It can all seem like an overwhelming thought exercise.

When you strip away all that isn’t necessary, it can become very simple.

Pull the big levers.

As in, work with that person to allot the training hours in their programme to focus on their main priorities.

For my client Jen, coming from a mainly strength and crossfit background, although with some running experience, I almost had a blank canvass to start working on.

Whilst I knew she could run easy miles, there was a very distinct drop off when it came to pushing into lactate threshold and above.

You might think that’s ideal for an aerobic event like the Arizona 300, but the gap here for her was that we needed to raise the ceiling of her energy systems, so that her aerobic max was higher - this way, her easy miles would in fact become even easier. Far more efficient essentially, and that is what you need when thinking about how much work the body needs to do on long ultramarathons.

Her training for a long time resembled almost a 60/40, pyramidal approach where there was a lot of threshold sessions to work on.

And this was also combined with a much more “actual speed” approach to compliment the aerobic nature of her programme, which came in the format of a lot of short fast hill repeats, strides and hill strides.

Once we’d worked on this initial stage, we then moved into a polarised approach, replacing the short fast hills with more VO2 based sessions, basically intervals on the flat - running hard for multiple sets of 1, 2 or 3 minutes at a time (I prefer to use time based intervals for ultra training as 400 metres or 800 metres is kind of irrelevant) to push into zones well above her threshold.

She always had a long run to do on a weekend, whether it ranged from 90 minutes to a maximum of 3 hours. I don’t believe there are any benefits that you can get on an ongoing basis from running longer than 3 hours. There is only so much aerobic stimulus your body can absorb, and going beyond 3 hours is a risk as it starts to compromise how much you can recover before your next training week begins.

The only time I gave her longer to do than 3 hours was the final long run before a 24 hour race we used in the build up to the Arizona 300, when she ran for 4 hours. She still managed to run 110km in the 24 hour race and came 2nd for most distance covered.

In these final stages, we’ve focused on stacking more back to back long runs (one shorter, one longer) to get a little more of that relevant multi-day stimulus - but nothing crazy and again, nothing beyond 3 hours in a day.

In terms of strength, we started very generalised, with a wide variety of accessory work to complement the main 3 lifts (squat, bench and deadlift), and only really removed the accessory work in the final 2 months prior to the Arizona 300, so make it into a more minimal approach.

And that, in a nutshell, is how you prep someone from Jen’s training background for the Arizona Monster 300 in a “Hybrid Athlete” style.

All we need to do now is do the thing…I’ll be out on the course with her pacing 200 miles alongside - so hopefully, the next update will be all out what happened…