Running Plan Review Run Like a Pro Ultramarathon Level 2

Does it build you up smartly?

Shifting the emphasis from one block of training to the next tends to beat holding one mix all the way through. This plan holds one mix. The running grows, and the long run goes from 80 minutes to 5 hours, but the hard days rotate through the same set from start to finish: hill climbs, intervals, fartlek runs, runs that finish fast, and long steady efforts. Week 16's Friday hills are the same session as week 10's. The upside is that nothing gets rusty. The cost is that no block of weeks narrows in on what a long race needs most.

The sessions are also bare on the page. Week 2's Tuesday reads as 40 minutes easy, then 10 minutes at a named effort, and nothing says what that run is meant to do for you.

Does it protect you from injury?

Day to day, yes. Over the weeks, less so: the big weeks arrive fast, and strength is left out.

Week 3 is one of the book's lighter weeks, so part of the climb into week 4 is the planned rebound. But week 4 still runs more than week 2, and it brings the plan's first 4-minute intervals in the same week. The 40-minute steady run and the first tempo run also land in weeks where the running jumps. Sudden jumps in weekly running tend to raise injury risk, and a new kind of hard session adds strain that the mileage alone doesn't show.

The long run is where your legs will feel it most. Coming out of each lighter week in the second half, it doubles or more: 1 hour 45 minutes in week 9, then 3 and a half hours in week 10. 2 hours in week 12, then 4 and a half in week 13. 2 hours in week 15, then 5 in week 16. Each time, the lighter week lets you catch your breath, and then Sunday asks for more time on your feet than anything the plan has asked before. Many running injuries appear to start suddenly, often right after a single run that goes well past what the legs have done lately. Those three Sundays are the weeks to watch, and an ache that lingers after one of them deserves your attention.

Strength is missing too. The book offers general guidance, but no program, and nothing is on the schedule. That's a real gap in a plan with 7 runs a week and a 5-hour long run, because strength training substantially lowers the risk of sports injury, more than stretching does. Where it goes in a week with no rest day, and what each session holds, you'll have to decide yourself.

The rest of the protection is solid. Hard days never land back to back, across all 35 of them. In the three weeks with a weekend double, the second hard session moves up to Thursday so Friday stays easy before it. Most hard sessions open with 15 minutes of easy running and a set of drills and strides. Every third week is lighter, with Monday's run dropped, six lighter weeks in all. Training that piles up without a break tends to raise the risk of injury and illness, and a plan you follow on your own needs that relief built in. The book also gives a clear rule for when to run through an illness and when to rest.

What happens when you miss a day?

The book bends, but the calendar doesn't.

In the book, there's real give. Any easy run can become cross-training, so a day when your legs are sore or your hours are short can still count. After more than 3 days off, the rule is to drop back a week. And the line between hard and easy days is meant to be read loosely.

The printed schedule has none of that. It doesn't mark which of the week's three big sessions to keep, so in a short week you're choosing between Tuesday's tempo, Friday's hills and Sunday's long run on your own. And in two weeks of every three there's a run on all 7 days, so a missed Tuesday can only move onto a day that already has a run of its own.

Effort is where the book is strongest. Training zones work best tied to your own physiology, and that's how this plan sets them: by how long you could hold an effort, from six minutes up to two hours, or by how you'd race a 5K, 10K or half marathon right now. The book suggests checking them with pace, heart rate and feel together. But the schedule prints only the zone's name, with no reminder of how it should feel.

Will it get you ready for race day?

Yes. This plan builds the long runs an ultra asks for, and it ends with a proper taper.

An ultra is mostly a test of how long your legs keep working once they're tired. In marathon training, runners whose long runs go longer tend to finish faster, though no study has tested whether shorter, faster sessions could do the same job, and an ultra only raises the stakes. In runners who already train, extra running probably does more for how well the legs hold up than for aerobic fitness, though the evidence is still thin, and holding up is what the late miles of an ultra call on.

The long run climbs to 3 and a half hours in week 10, 4 and a half in week 13, and 5 hours in week 16. The book lets you mix running and hiking on that last one, which is how most runners will cover the steep parts of an ultra anyway. In weeks 11, 14 and 17, the long run splits across the weekend, so Sunday starts on legs that ran long on Saturday. The last of those weekends adds up to 6 hours.

Then the plan backs off. Week 18 is a lighter week, and race week, leaving out the race itself, is about a third of the plan's biggest week, with 2 short sets of brisk efforts to keep your legs awake. A taper like this, with less running and some brisk efforts kept, improves race performance compared with training straight through.

Are the workouts varied enough?

Yes. The hard days stay fresh for all 19 weeks.

Easy running does most of the work: it builds the base that every harder session stands on. About 88 percent of the running here is easy. The rest comes in 35 hard sessions across 7 kinds, ranging from 30-second hill sprints in week 2 to a full hour of steady running in week 16. The most unusual one appears twice: 11 minutes that build smoothly from a jog to a full sprint, a walk that eases back into a jog, then a shorter build of 6 minutes.

Mixing easy running with clearly hard intervals and fartlek runs may build endurance a little better than long stretches at one medium effort. Each hard day gets its own job, and none of them has to carry the whole plan.

Drills and strides run through nearly every week too, on one easy run most weeks and in most warm-ups. You pick the drills from a catalog in the book. Strides are a few minutes of work that leave your legs feeling lively. Short, explosive work like the hill sprints can make each stride a little cheaper in energy, though strides themselves haven't been tested that way.