 Have you ever done a 10k race as part of your training for a 10k race? Have you ever raced a marathon as part of your training for a marathon? And have you ever run a 100 mile race in preparation for a 100 mile race? Well today, we're going to find out whether that's such a good idea as we look back at week 5 of UTMB training. I'm doing my hill reps at the start of week 6. So let's have a look at what training looked like for week 5. And we didn't do too badly. I managed 130 kilometres of distance with over 2000 metres of elevation gain. If you work in feet, that's around 7000 feet of elevation gain. And we started on Monday morning filming the previous episode of the UTMB training series doing hill reps on Monday morning. Monday evening was a steady 10k on the treadmill live on Zwift. Remember, if you want to watch any of my Zwift runs, join the Zwift run channel on YouTube. And you can see any of my runs live on the treadmill. So with 25k and 350 metres of elevation gain on Monday, we then added to that on Tuesday morning with 500 more metres of elevation gain. 12% on the treadmill on the Zwift run channel doing the film my run 500 event. And then me and my mate Charles went out on Tuesday evening and we did 10 miles flat along the seafront. If you watch the channel regularly, you'll know by now that Wednesday night is treadmill interval night. We go live on Zwift and we do over threshold for 600 metres and under threshold for 600 metres. That's my hard effort for the week. Thursdays all on the treadmill as well. 500 metres climbing in the film my run 500 in the morning and then a nice easy 6 or 7k in the evening on Zwift. 10 miles on the hills on Friday morning just getting in some more elevation. Follow me on Strava to check out all my training which is all documented on there. The link is just here. It was a very relaxed 9k on Zwift on Friday evening but Saturday I did park run. And it was an interesting session on Saturday morning. We didn't travel anywhere different. We did our local park run in Worthing and I decided to run nice and easy with Victoria pretty much at the back of the pack. So we started out and I was just feeling a bit cramped in. There was too many people around and Victoria had found somebody to chat to and I just thought, do you know what, let's run. So I just sped up a bit. So I worked my way through the crowd and eventually ended up making park run on Saturday morning a progressive session with my final kilometre being all out absolutely lung busting as hard as I could go. I think I did it in 340 something. So Saturday's park run, we're going to put that down as a hard effort. And that bought me to about 98k for the week, perfect for Sunday's long run which would be my longest run of the training block so far. I had intended to start my long run at about 9am on Sunday morning but I was incredibly lazy getting out of bed. I sat around most of the morning drinking coffee and procrastinating. I eventually managed to get out on my run at around 12.30. The problem was I felt a little bit rushed by then and I did something I don't normally do. You know that I'm a big advocate of 80-20 running so your 80% is in zones 1 and 2 and your 20% is hard effort in zones 4 and 5. Very, very rarely do I run in zone 3. And because I felt rushed, if you look at Strava, if you look at my heart rate, a lot of my heart rate is in zone 3 because I was pushing a bit harder to try and do the run a bit quicker than normal. Which was not great because by the end of the run I was feeling very fatigued. The last 3k really was tiring and so much so that yesterday, Monday, today's Tuesday, I would normally have gone out for a hill session or at least some kind of run and I felt too fatigued and that's the problem with running in zone 3 is that you can too easily get tired, fatigued and not want to go out running the next day. That said, 20 miles done, 600 metres of elevation gain and that was me for the week. So all in we did 130 kilometres of distance, 45 kilometres on the treadmill and 85 kilometres outside so you know now we start to build the mileage, we do a lot more mileage outside than on the treadmill. And we're going to continue that with week 6, we're going to do another 130k and we're going to climb another 2,000 or so metres of elevation gain. But week 7, we have a race, I'm running the 100 mile North Downsway and that is going to be at least 160, 165 kilometres on top of whatever training we do in week 7. I imagine that if you're watching this you are interested in ultra distance running or at least trail running and I imagine you've probably done a 10k race before and in your training I'm sure that you've probably done a 10 kilometre distance slower obviously but as part of your training for your 10k race. And similarly I often advocate doing a marathon in your training really slowly and comfortably as part of your training for a marathon so you may be doing a fast road marathon as your race and in training you could do a slow trail marathon for example. I would argue that's perfectly okay to do as long as you leave enough time for recovery after your race before your main A race, before your goal race. So don't do a marathon in training a week before your fast road marathon but you know if you leave it a month before or three weeks even sometimes you can recover from a marathon in time to do a marathon. However a 100 miles is a little bit different. I am doing the North Downsway 100 because I want to do the Centurion Grand Slam. It is just an accident that it happens to fall just a few weeks before UTMB. I am hopeful that I can recover just in time and just well enough from the North Downsway 100 in order to finish the UTMB 100. That's my main race, that's the race that I want to finish. But I also want to finish the North Downsway 100 as part of the Centurion Grand Slam. Now yes in the long term running 100 miles will give you the experience, the know-how, the confidence to move on and do a faster 100 or a more difficult 100 in the future. So doing 100 mile races is great because it sets you up for your next step on the ultra adventure. But don't do a 100 mile race in your training block, that's just counterproductive. If you've never run a marathon before it can be really good to do the marathon distance in your training block to give you confidence that you can cover the distance and it also is really good for training. I mean if you do it slowly you are building mitochondria, you are building capillaries to transport your oxygen, you're building that base aerobic fitness which will help you when it comes to running your fast A race marathon. And similarly doing a 10k race in preparation for a 10k race it's not going to physically damage you, it's not going to cause you problems, it's going to make you stronger, it's going to give you confidence that you can cover the distance. But running a 100 mile race is completely different. If you've never run a 100 mile race before don't try and do it in training in your training block before your actual 100 mile race. It's just such a bad idea, it's going to damage your muscles. If you don't make it it's going to ruin your confidence as well. Just hope that the training you put in is enough to get you there and a 100 mile race is pretty much mostly mental strength anyway. When you get beyond 50 miles it's all about what's in there and not necessarily what's in your legs. If you'd like to watch a video of what I think is probably the most difficult 100 mile race in the world click that link just there. And I'll see you on the start line next time. Take care everyone, bye bye.