 Welcome to FMR, my name is Stephen. You join me at the perfect time because this is my first run in a new training block, Training 4, my next 100 mile race, the Lakeland 100. I, is he running backwards up a hill? I hear you ask. No, it's not some amazing new training technique, although actually, it's probably doing my quads of the world of good. It's just because the sun's up there, so I'm about 4K into this first outdoor run of the new training block. I've got 14 weeks until the Lakeland 100. Never done it before, 100 miles in the Lake District. Really tough, so we'll see what happens, but I'm gonna try and get myself as ready as possible. My mantra is still complete rather than compete. So very rarely do I enter a race thinking I'm gonna compete for the top spots. Occasionally I do, but not very often. Most of the time, it is simply about being well trained enough to do a decent time that I'm not embarrassed by, but mainly to complete the race. And over 100 miles, you really don't know what's gonna happen. Well, I've never done anything like this on the channel before, and I've never taken you through kind of a whole training block to show you what I do. And a lot of people have asked me, when do we see how you train? So I'm gonna take you along this journey. This is that training series, and it's for an ultra. So we're not training for road. We're not training fast. We're training for an ultra distance race. Now, having said that I'm training for an ultra, it's not so different to training for a sub three marathon, say. We're still gonna stick to the 80-20 principles which I run by, so that is 80% of my running should be easy, relaxed, low heart rate. 20% of my running should include some high heart rate effort. So for example, if we're doing an interval session, which we will be doing, at least some of the time my heart rate needs to get into zones four or five. So hard effort. But obviously, during that session my heart rate isn't gonna be in zones four and five all the time, but it still counts as the part of that 20% hard effort runs. So we're gonna be doing long runs. We're gonna be doing interval sessions. I'm gonna be doing lots of treadmill running. As you know, I run with Zwift on the treadmill a lot. If you want to go and watch me doing my live treadmill runs that you need to go and subscribe to the Zwift Run Live YouTube channel. That's a different YouTube channel to this one. But while you're here, you may as well subscribe to the film My Run Channel, just click down below. You know what to do, click the bell icon and you'll get notified every time I upload a new episode in this series. What I'm finding this training block is tempo based running or marathon pace running. Often when I'm training for a marathon, I will stick in one or two marathon paced efforts, just to gauge where I am in my fitness. And that's around, say, 155, 160 BPM for me, kind of middle to the top of zone three, early zone four, perhaps. But you won't find that in this training block because what we're training for is endurance and stamina, not just over three hours, but over 24 hours. And you're going to be running this pace, slow, easy pace for almost all of that. You do want to do some interval training. We are going to be doing interval training and that's going to build our VO2 max. And it's going to help me climbing the hills so I've got enough oxygen so I'm not heavy breathing when climbing up steep at a sense. So today's run we're going to cover 10 miles. You'll notice I'm not taking anything with me. I haven't got any water, I haven't got any gels. Certainly won't be taking any gels with me, but no food, no water. 10 miles should be able to cut with that perfectly well, a couple of hours, an hour and 45 minutes, given that I'm stopping quite a lot to do bits of filming as well. Most of my runs will be here in West Sussex on the South Downs, the South Downs way and around about. Occasionally I might nip off elsewhere just for a bit of a change of scenery and to give you guys something else to look at. But you know, you can't argue with this place. It's absolutely beautiful, especially on a day like this. So here we are at the highest point of the run. Up on the top, well, I'm not quite the top of Cisbury Ring in West Sussex. Over in the distance over there is Devils Dyke. Another high point near Brighton. And then in front of me is the coast and Worthing. In terms of weekly distance, well, I do start with a bit of a baseline. So, you know, I'm not starting from scratch here. So this week we'll do 100K, 60 odd miles. Then we'll keep it at 100K for the next few weeks, for five weeks or so of 100K. And then we'll start building it up a bit. Now the maximum I'll probably get to, a couple of weeks before Lakeland 100, will maybe be 100 miles. We'll maybe try and get 100 miler in a couple of weeks before, two or three weeks before Lakeland. So that'll be my mileage. It'll be 100K a week for the next five, six weeks. Then we'll start to build it up, maybe add 10K per week and see if we can get near to 100 miles, at least one week in the training block. We'll do plenty of uphill running outdoors and on the treadmill. We'll do lots of downhill running as well, because you can't neglect that when you're training for a mountain race or a hilly trail race. And in terms of what Lakeland is, Lakeland 100, having never done it, the only thing I'm going to be able to compare it to is the arch of attrition. So the arch of attrition generally takes me around about 28 hours, 28 to 30 hours to complete. So let's work on that basis, shall we, that maybe I can complete the Lakeland 100 in under 30 hours. That's maybe what we'll aim for. Don't get that in the London marathon, do you? Beautiful, isn't it? That's what you come here for, isn't it? That's what you do trail running for. Beautiful scenery and the sound of nature. I don't wear headphones. You'll notice I very rarely wear headphones when I go out running. So over the course of the series, we will be talking about lots of different things. Nutrition, for example, I mentioned earlier that I haven't brought any water or any food with me on this run. And there's a reason for that, so we can talk about that. And we'll talk about kit, clothing, what shoes I'm gonna wear, what shoes I generally prefer, and GPS watches, we can talk about those. And anything else you want to talk about, do drop a comment down below if you wanna hear me talk about any particular subject. And if you're not subscribed, please do that now. Go and click the like button as well and that little bell icon, you know what to do. So that's it, thank you very much for joining me on this first episode of the Lakeland 100 Training Series. I'll see you on the second episode. Take care, thanks very much for watching. Subscribe down below and we'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.