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!)