[Mark]

Hi team,

I’m having my first foray into skyrunning next year as I’d like to attend a couple of skyrunning courses held over 3 days. The first camp is in late April 2022 in the Lake District, UK with around (total) 40-50km and 3000m of vertical gain, and the second camp will be in September/October in Romsdal, Norway, with around (total) 50km and 4300m of gain. Runs will vary from 10km, 700m to 20km, 1400-1500m.

Does anyone have any experience of these types of courses and the nature of the training that you did? My broad plan was to adapt the Mike Foote Big Mountain Plan with a focus on the following:

• Doing both the ME Workout and the Functional S&C (2/3 days apart) during the base phase.
• Aerobic runs: building to do around 3-4 weekends of back-to-back high vertical runs (1000m+ each) in the later stages to build aerobic capacity, rather than doing 1 specific long aerobic weekend effort.
• Focusing more on the Z3 and Hill Sprints for Specific Strength, rather than Z4/Z5 sprints, in order to deal with the long uphill efforts spread out over many days.

Would be grateful if anyone has similar experiences they could share and lessons learned.

Topic

[Shashi]

Shashi on May 3, 2021 at 12:48 pm #53656

Mark,

Sorry for the delay in responding to your question.

Can you please share your training background? I will send a note to other moderators/coaches for input.

[oliver.heyes]

oliver.heyes on May 22, 2021 at 2:01 am #54222

Hi Mark,

I’ve got to the last 7 weeks of the Big Vert. I am training for a 2700m 28km race but due my location I often cannot get this kind of consistent gradient. I am now regularly running routes of around 30km and 1500m of ascent, including technical climbing up to grade 3 scrambling. In my opinion you probably don’t need to adapt this program, if your body can handle it, it’s pretty comprehensive and pretty intense.

If anything I would maybe look at completing it this year to give a big uphill base, and using it again next year as a top up. Last year I based most of my training around it, even though my race was cancelled and I took time out to recover from COVID after week 3. It gave me a much better insight into my own expectations within the plan.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on June 29, 2021 at 4:10 pm #55235

I would be tempted to use the Big Vert training plan as is.