Bob Graham Training Log

A guy, who I assume is called Jonathan O'Keeffe, has utilised the Strava API to allow Strava users to produce details reports of their activities over the past year. This is the website address http://www.jonathanokeeffe.com/strava/annualSummary.php.

I used the site to export my activities to a comma-separated file (csv) that I was then able to import into Excel (or in my case Libre Office Calc (a free version of Microsoft office)). The data was imported in a raw format, basically one record for each activity. I wanted to group the data by week so that I would have an idea of the height (mtrs) and distance (km) I am achieving each week. This took a bit of Googling to extract the week number form each activity and a lot more Googling to find out the date of the first Monday in each week. It was then necessary to group the distance and heigh gain by week, which was achieved using the Spreadsheet "Pivot Table" functionality. From the Pivot Table it was then a simple task to create a couple of charts of the weekly height and distance completed. The results can be seen in the two images below.

I mentioned in another post that in September 2013 I started to develop an abdominal muscle injury. I struggled on with that until I got January's Trigger out of the way. That is why there is a peak right at the beginning of the year. Once the race was done I really cut back the running to concentrate on gym work to strengthen my core. This can be seen in the massive drop in activities in the spring. Since the late spring I have been slowly building up my activities and it is going pretty well at the moment.

Now that that I have the spread sheet functions in place it is a fairly straight-forward job to do more exports over the coming months and update these charts.

Bob Graham Training

Like many others I first heard of the Bob Graham via Feet in the Clouds. Unlike many others it really caught my imagination - I would love to have a got at that! That was 3 or 4 years ago. It was just not practicable back then. I was just too new to fell running (never ran in the lakes) and with a young family it would be very difficult to fit the training in around parenting duties. I though maybe when I am 50 and two of the kids are in secondary school I may be able to do it. Well that is next year and I have thrown my hat in the ring. I have got great support from the few guys at Pennine who know and looks of incomprehension  from my work colleagues!

From a bit of Googling and reading some of the invaluable threads on the FRA Forum I have got an idea of the type of training required. Basically the consensus is that it is climbing rather than miles ran that matters. The 68 miles for a BG in 24 hrs is a little bit less that 3 miles an hour.  It is the 26,000 ft (8000 metres) that is the challenging bit and from what I read it is the 8000 metres of down hill that is the real killer. So any Bob Graham training has to really concentrating on the climbing.

Surprisingly there is not a great amount of information available on the web for Bob Graham training schedules - so I had to create my own! I found a 6 month training plan for a 100 mile ultra, that I was able to open in the Google Docs spread sheet package. This is all based on distance - building up to the 100 miles on race day. Using the spread sheet functionality I took 100 miles to be equal to 3000 metres (10,000 ft) and recalculated all of the daily mileage targets as height gained. Living west of the Peak District I am not great on hills from the house. I have  one climb (Cobden Cross) a couple of Km from the house  (1.7km  212m (13%)). Much of my training will be based on doing reps of that. It is not really steep enough at 13% but it is much better than nothing and I know that doing 6 reps of it hurts like 'ell. Link to: Cobden Cross Strava Segment

The training plan below shows the results of my efforts. Basically it is build on blocks of 4 weeks. For 3 weeks each week builds up on the previous week while the fourth week is a rest week before building up to a higher  level over the next 3 weeks and then the next rest week. That pattern is repeated for 6 months.

This will be a guide - hopefully I will be doing the Long Tour of Pendle before Christmas and The Trigger after Christmas so I will be well ahead of the schedule come the middle of January. If anybody has any comments feel free to post below!

EDIT 09/09/2014
Had some feedback on the FRA Forum and this training plan is not enough. Basically I need to be achieving the 3000 m/wk 5 months before the BG attempt and keep doing that level of training for the next 4 months before beginning the taper.  The plans below for April and May are repeats of each other this will also need repeating for February and March which will mean bringing the earlier part of the plan forward by 2 months. This does not really matter as, said previously, I expected to be well ahead of the plan by the turn of the year anyway. What it does mean is that I underestimated the amount of work I will have to do in the spring - oops! Better to know now that to find out on the day I am not fit enough.

I will modify the plan and stick up a new "screen grab" of it. (done now!)