100 mile training plan, 32 weeks at minimum

The hundred is decided by what happens when it stops going well

This is the longest guided plan built here, and the honest framing is that fitness is rarely what ends a hundred miler. Almost everybody who starts one has a stretch that goes badly. What separates the finishers is not that they avoided it, it is that they had already decided what to do inside it.

So the questions at this distance are different. When will you sleep, and will that be a decision or an accident. What is your procedure when you stop being able to eat. Who is meeting you where. And whether a build this long can be completed without breaking you before the start line.

Sleep is a plan, not something that happens to you

Sleep strategy belongs to the event's demand profile, because it scales with how long you will be out. A fast finisher runs through one night and never faces the question. A mid-pack runner may face it twice, and the second night is not the same problem as the first.

Each ordinary option works for somebody. Run straight through and accept the low patch before dawn. Take a planned short stop at a named station, with someone whose job is to get you moving again. Or hold a stop in reserve for a bad patch rather than scheduling it. What matters is choosing beforehand, because the version of you deciding in the small hours is not the one you want making that call. Then rehearse it once in training, in the dark, tired.

Recovering from a bad patch is a trainable skill

The bad patch is not a risk to be avoided. It is a feature of the distance, and treating it as failure is what turns a slow hour into a withdrawal.

The response is mostly procedural and mostly boring. Slow down before you have to. Eat something different from whatever stopped working. Take salt and fluid deliberately rather than by feel. Sit down and fix your feet, which is almost never wasted time. Walk the climb. Let the low pass, because it usually does, and sooner than it feels like it will.

That checklist only helps when it is automatic, and automatic comes from rehearsal. Practise it in the back half of your longest training days, once things have already stopped being pleasant. Effort regulation and coping with discomfort are abilities like any other.

Crew and aid, planned from your own course

A crew plan is a set of decisions made while you can still make them. Which stations they can reach, what waits there, what you carry between them, where your night kit and your spare shoes join you, and who has the authority to tell you to sit down and eat.

Build it in hours rather than in miles. Your uploaded route is read as geometry, so the gap to the next crew point can be estimated as time on your feet, which is the figure that decides what goes in the pack. Race plans that survive contact with a bad night tend to be the ones written against hours.

The training has to be survived too

The biggest threat to your race is not under-training. It is arriving already broken, usually after a run of ambitious weeks your body was not ready for. Consistency across the whole build beats any heroic week, and that is enforced rather than hoped for.

Your weekly climb is bounded by what you have genuinely been doing lately rather than by how many weeks remain. Running is the impact discipline, so its projected rise is watched separately against a tighter limit than the systemic one, and single-run length carries explicit ceilings. Recovery weeks are part of the rhythm, not a reward for surviving. How the planning engine fills the weeks covers how sessions are chosen inside those bounds.

What a fixed plan cannot know

It cannot know your threshold, your climb lengths or your likely finish time, so it cannot tell you when it gets dark for you, and it cannot know which days you actually own. Across a build this long something will go wrong, which a printed schedule has no answer to.

How your plan is built

Your history goes in as measured supply, your course as measured demand, and your available days bind the result. You never enter a load figure. The gap between supply and demand sets what each block emphasises, and the season runs backwards from race day through Prep, Foundation, Event shaping and Peak, into a taper solved against a form band. Foundation is what other plans call base, and Event shaping is what they call build. How guided run plans are personalised covers the machinery underneath.

What changes when your goal changes

The wizard asks what outcome you want, not only which race. There are five levels, from finishing to excellent, and the minimums scale with your answer. Chasing an excellent result rather than a finish means roughly twice the weekly training time and two more sessions a week, over a longer minimum build. At this distance that is the difference between a build that fits your life and one that does not. The figures above are the finisher floors, and a season can run up to a year.

What a week actually looks like

Mostly easy aerobic running, because that is what carries this distance. A long day growing toward the long session floor shown above. One or two sessions train the ability that week is tackling, at its real intensity. Late in the build the long days start to resemble your race, on your kind of terrain, fuelled at race intake, some of it after dark, with the low patches used as practice rather than treated as bad luck.

When life interferes

Missed load is forgiven and never redistributed. Illness suspends the plan, rebuilds toward the level you had genuinely attained, and re-forecasts your race honestly. Small adjustments apply themselves, anything significant waits for your approval, and anything that looks like pain or injury is escalated to you rather than diagnosed.

Questions people ask

Do I need to have finished a shorter ultra first?

Not formally, but your history decides where the plan can start. A shorter ultra can be carried inside the season as a supported tune-up rather than a distraction, and the 100K plan covers that build on its own terms.

How long does my longest training run get?

Toward the long session floor shown above, in graduated steps rather than jumps, and never as far as race distance. The rest of your fatigue resistance comes from where effort sits inside a long day, not from length alone.

What if I lose a month to injury?

The plan suspends rather than pretending, rebuilds toward what you had actually attained, and asks you to accept a revised forecast. Returning from injury is always a change you approve.