100K training plan for a real schedule

A hundred kilometres is an execution problem

At this distance most runners are out long enough to watch the light change, and many are out long enough to run into the dark and into a second phase of the day. Fitness still decides how fast you cover the ground. Execution decides whether you get to use it.

Four things carry most of that. Whether you kept eating at a rate you had practised. Whether you can still run competently when your world shrinks to a beam of light. Whether you knew what sat between one aid station and the next. And whether you paced by effort on a course where pace means very little. All four are trainable, and all four are cheap compared with the fitness underneath them.

Fuelling is a capacity you build over a block

Carbohydrate tolerance per hour is not a fixed personal trait. It responds to training like anything else, and the gut is trained the same way everything else is, by a progression rather than a single heroic attempt.

So intake is planned rather than improvised. Long sessions carry a per-hour carbohydrate target that climbs across a block, using the products you intend to race with, at the intensity you intend to race at. Fluid and sodium are personalised from a sweat test rather than from a chart, because losses vary enormously between people. Afterwards, what you actually took in is checked against what was planned. That is the difference between arriving with a fuelling plan and arriving with a fuelling habit.

Night running is a skill and a logistics problem

Running in the dark is slower on the same terrain, and it should be. Your footing is read later, technical ground demands more attention, and your effort at a given pace quietly rises. If your finish time puts you out past sunset, the sensible response is to rehearse it rather than to hope.

That means long runs that start before dawn or finish after dusk, with the light you will actually carry, the batteries you will actually change and the pack you will actually wear. Discovering that your beam washes out the ground in fog is cheap in training and expensive deep into a race. It also means meeting the low patch that arrives in the small hours while you are still close to home.

Aid stations are spacing in distance and in time

The gap between aid stations is usually printed in kilometres, which is the less useful of the two numbers. A short segment that climbs steeply is a long segment in time, and time is what decides how much water and food you have to carry into it.

So when you upload the course, spacing is read both ways. The route is cut into ordered climbs, descents and flats with their own lengths and gradients, which turns a distance between stations into an estimate of hours between stations. Build your carrying strategy on that. The event analyzer covers how a course becomes a demand profile, including wind and the weather your date has historically produced.

Pace tells you almost nothing, so effort is the control

On a course with climbs, descents and rough footing, pace varies so much between segments that trying to hold one is actively harmful. Effort is the variable you steer with, and it is treated as first-class evidence rather than as a fallback for people without a power meter. One detail follows deliberately. The plan never shows the effort it expected beside the box where you record what you felt, because seeing it would anchor you, and the gap between the two is one of the most useful signals in a long build.

What a fixed plan cannot know

It cannot know your threshold, your climb lengths, your aid spacing or your likely finish time, so it cannot tell you when it gets dark for you. It cannot know that Tuesday evening is the only weekday you own, and it cannot revise itself when you lose a fortnight.

How your plan is built

Your history is measured as supply, your uploaded course as demand, and the days you can genuinely train are the binding constraint. 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, across a longer minimum build. The figures above are the finisher floors, they are destinations rather than week one, and a season can run up to a year.

What a week actually looks like

Mostly easy aerobic running, one long day growing toward the long session floor shown above, and one or two sessions training whatever ability that week is tackling at its real intensity. As the race approaches the long day stops being only duration. It carries a sustained block at goal effort late on, on terrain like your course, fuelled at race intake, and in the dark if your finish time calls for it.

When life interferes

Missed load is forgiven and never redistributed onto the following week. Illness suspends the plan, rebuilds toward the level you had genuinely reached, then re-forecasts the race honestly. Small adjustments apply themselves, changing your primary focus or rebuilding a block waits for your approval, and anything that looks like pain or injury is escalated to you, because this is training guidance and not medical care.

Questions people ask

Do I need to train at night?

If your projected finish puts you in darkness, yes, and the plan places those sessions rather than leaving it to you. If you will finish in daylight, the hours are better spent elsewhere.

How do I know my hourly intake is right?

You build it, then verify it. The target progresses across the season, and each long session compares what you planned to take with what you actually took.

Is a hundred miler just this again with more of it?

No. The next distance up adds sleep strategy and crew logistics as first-class problems. The 100 mile plan is built around that.