This plan is for experienced runners to build on their previous performances with hard, very carefully planned training. It uses accumulation, consistency, specialized strength, and proven impact resilience principles to get you into prime shape for a race or project involving hard climbing but where you also need/want to go fast. This plan and its volume are appropriate for runners preparing for a skyrace or mountain ultra less than 100 miles, or looking to PR on a single mountain ascent or mountain linkup. It is six months long, but you're welcome to jump in where you see fit, and please feel free to contact me with questions before or during the plan, sarah.haubert@hotmail.com

This plan is for runners who have a large aerobic base, who have already trained with elevation gain in the past, who have experience running 50-60 mile weeks in previous seasons, who are serious about training, and who have recently been running at least 30-40 miles a week. It is a complete plan, with tempo, speedwork, strength, mobility, stability, plyo, and recovery, and as such it requires a large time commitment. Also note that most of the plan is on a 9-day cycle instead of a weekly cycle, because it's more ideal for hard training and recovery, so you won't have a consistent weekly routine, which might be hard for some folks.

There's instructions for gain if you live somewhere with hilly trails, as well as supplemental/alternate workouts for flatlanders who need to supplement their weekly gain with treadmill incline or stairmill work. For the strength portion of this plan, you aren't required per se to have any of the equipment, but it's ideal if you have a couple weights and some bands. For this plan, you really need to have either local trails with gain or access to a treadmill with incline, a stairmill or similar (gyms often have at least one Gaunlet or Jacob's Ladder). This plan uses HR and structured workouts, but there are also instructions for perceived exertion if you don't use HR as a metric.

*Please note that the weekly mileage and/or weekly duration numbers get skewed and are unreliable for a few different reasons: most of the run workouts are distance-based but some are duration-based. The volume for most of this plan is 50-60 miles. I've taken that into account when I added up weekly volume but it could be confusing when you look at the averages if one or two runs that week show up in duration and the rest are tallied up in mileage. Also some of the workouts are doubled to show a treadmill alternate option, and workouts marked as run or crosstraining show up in the crosstraining column instead of the run miileage.