Training for an ultra around a full-time job

Most of the runners I coach have a job, a family and about eight to ten hours a week for training. That is enough for a 100 km build and, spent well, enough for a hundred. Spent badly, twenty hours would not be.

Rank the week before you fill it

Three sessions carry an ultra build: the long run, one quality session, and strength. Everything else is easy running that supports them. When the week collapses, and it will, the easy running is what goes, in this order:

• Keep the long run. Move it if you must; do not shorten it below the plan without telling me.
• Keep one strength session. Twenty-five minutes with a trap bar in the garage counts.
• Keep the quality session if you are fresh enough to do it properly. If not, it becomes easy running, not a half-hearted version of itself.
• Drop easy runs. A missed easy run costs almost nothing. A missed long run costs a week.

The shapes that work

Ways to find time that are not more time

• Run commute one way, twice a week. Easy miles you were going to sit through anyway.
• Long run before the family wakes. Out at half five, back by nine, and the day is still yours.
• Strength at home. A trap bar, a box and a set of plates cover most of the programme.
• Double days are for people with time. You do not have time. One good run beats two rushed ones.
• Say no to the club's Thursday session if it is the wrong session. Social running is easy running or it is your quality session; it cannot be both.

When work wins

A brutal fortnight at work is a training input like any other. Sleep drops, stress rises, the check-in says so, and the plan bends: the long run holds or shortens a little, the quality session goes easy, nothing is added back afterwards. Missed training is never repaid, because repaying it is how tired people get hurt.

What I watch

• Which sessions get done when the week gets busy, because that tells me the athlete's real priorities and I plan around them.
• Sleep hours against training hours. When the second rises and the first falls, we are borrowing.
• Easy-run heart rate on the run commutes, which drifts up when work stress is doing the damage before the run starts.
• Whether the athlete reports the bad fortnight, or hides it until the long run exposes it.

How the check-in works and what I do with it is on the private coaching page. Spacing the hard sessions over more than seven days, which suits a lot of working athletes, is in the seven-day week note.

Evidence level: the priorities and the weekly shapes are coaching practice, not trial evidence. The claim that missed training should not be repaid rests on the long-run jump data in the progression note and on the general injury literature linking rapid load spikes to injury.