New Year. New Goals.
With the arrival of a new calendar year, so begins (for many) a new list of resolutions or goals. For those of us in the ultramarathon world, what that also usually means by now is that most of the lotteries have come to a close and you can frame out your race calendar if you haven’t already. You can set your goals big or small and start to get excited about the possibilities another race season will bring. Then, if you haven’t already, it’s time to make sure you get your training in gear.
For anyone with Winter or Early Spring races, hopefully that’s already well under way. For those with Summer or Fall races you might be thinking, “I have all the time in the world for that - I’ll start training later.” Well, the fact of the matter is that Summer and Fall races will be here before we know it, and effective training occurs on a magnitude of months or years - not weeks.
With that in mind, here are three tips to help you achieve your 2025 goals.
Approach training with a Long Range Plan. What does this mean? We should always have an eye towards the future to ensure adequate time ahead of races - especially A races - to prepare properly. When you know a race is 6, 7, 9, 10+ months away and use that time to build a methodical training plan. This type of runway allows you to really work through different, focused periods of training building fitness that sets you up for success.
Work on weaknesses early in training. Maybe you don’t have any. But, if you’re like 99% of us, there are probably things in your races that you could improve on. This could be climbing, general hiking, downhills, technical trails - anything that gives you a challenge more than other aspects of a race. The sooner you can start working on those things, the more time you give yourself to improve that weakness and potentially eliminate it as one.
Go hard now. Go long later. When you’re far away from your goal races, you want to be building as much fitness as possible. The best way to do that is through higher intensity workouts. With higher intensity, comes more rest and less overall volume since it is more demanding on the body. Then, as you progress through the calendar, you can scale back this intensity and ramp the volume and cranking out those really long, long runs.
Happy New Year - hope to see you out on the trails and crushing your goals!
If you’d like a coach to help achieve those goals contact us or check out our coaching plans.
