The Pillars of Ultra-running

If you want to increase your ability to train and be able to do longer ultras without increasing your risk of illness and injury, the first step is to increase your ability to tolerate more stress.

This happens by exposing yourself to training over a long period of time, in a controlled way. That means training, not just in the short term, but over years and decades.

Training Age

The concept of training age in the Pathway allows you to decide how long you should take before tackling longer distances and gives you a blueprint to plan your journey through ultra running.

For example, if you are an international rower, you will have the ability to tolerate a large training load. Your aerobic capacity and “fitness” will be very high. However, whilst your connective tissues might be trained to move a boat quickly or to lift heavy weights specific to rowing, your bones, joints and connective tissue are unlikely to be able to tolerate the impact that comes with the many thousands of steps that are required in an ultra without breaking down. 

Fitness and Durability are Different

This same concept applies for those who are runners, but due to injury have not been able to run, but have been able to maintain aerobic fitness eg on a bike. The return to running needs to be slow and controlled to allow the connective tissue and bone to “catch up” and adapt to the impact stress that goes with running many miles on potentially technical terrain.

Training age in the Pathway is therefore a subjective combination of aerobic fitness and recent ability to run [30 miles] a week with no negative outcome. Those most at risk of injury are those with a high aerobic training age as their cardiovascular system will be able to tolerate almost any length of training session putting their physical structure at risk of damage.

Preventing injury

Any return from injury should always be slow and controlled and ideally under the watchful eye of a trained professional eg a physio as they will “hold you back”.

Most ultra runners don’t need encouragement to do more training, they need guard rails to slow them down to manage their health and injury risk in the longer term.

Ultra running requires skills beyond running

You need the ability to move well on technical terrain, to manage steep ascents and descents, to navigate, to fuel and be self sufficient for sometimes long periods of time. You need the mental resilience to manage the discomfort, the physical strength to carry a pack with mandatory kit, the confidence to run at night and to use a head torch in unfamiliar places.

Anna Troup

Our Purpose

The Pathway has been designed to not only safely build mileage via increasing your training age, but also to slowly add skills so that your confidence to take part in longer races in more technical terrain also improves. 

A roadmap into building a long-term future in ultra-running.