Late June, in the Serra da Freita. One hundred kilometres of technical mountain trail, roughly 7,000 metres of climbing and the same again in descent, an estimated twenty hours on his feet. That is A Freita 2026, and it is the single line on the calendar that the last three months of Bento Galado's training have been bending toward.
The life around the training
Bento is a father of a three-year-old with a nine-to-six job, and that, more than any single workout, shapes how he trains. "Time and mental energy are scarce resources," he told me. The hard part of the build was rarely the fitness. It was the decision, at the end of a full workday with a head already full, between forcing a hard session and resting. Training to the data instead of the ego is what made that call survivable: "It took away the weight of the guilt when my body needed to back off, and gave me the confidence that the build was still completely on track."
Twenty hours is a different sport
A road marathon is a hard afternoon. A 100 km mountain ultra is a different category of problem: you are not racing a pace, you are managing a day. Power-hiking the steep pitches, saving the quads for 7,000 metres of descent, eating and drinking for hours, keeping the head in it when the legs have been working since sunrise. The athletes who finish these are not the fastest ones. They are the ones who prepared for the duration.
The morning that mattered
Thirty days out, on a Thursday morning in São Brás de Alportel, Bento went out for the rehearsal: nearly three hours of trail, 1,120 metres of vertical gain, in heat climbing past 31°C. 199 TSS. The post-run analysis flagged the thing that actually wins ultras, and it was not his fitness: it was hydration and gut tolerance over a long, hot effort. That is the right thing to be rehearsing. By the time A Freita arrives, the climbing will not be new, the heat will not be new, and the hours will not be new.
The shape of the build
Bento follows a Pyramidal model, Joe Friel's school: a wide aerobic base, a layer of tempo and threshold above it, a small cap of VO2max work at the top. For an ultra, that shape is correct. The slow, long, hilly hours are most of the calendar; the sharp stuff is seasoning.
The block had a real rehearsal baked into it. In mid-May he ran Trail Moleiro, a 32 km race with 1,500 metres of climbing, as a hard tune-up inside the build rather than a goal of its own. From there the volume climbed into back-to-back three-and-a-half-hour long runs in June, the time-on-feet that a twenty-hour day demands, before the taper.
What the score noticed
The Training Score read the build back to him week by week:
| Date | Total | Overload | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-10 | 63 | 75 | 62 |
| 2026-05-17 | 68 | 100 | 66 |
| 2026-05-24 | 64 | 67 | 68 |
| 2026-05-31 | 66 | 80 | 68 |
Overload hit the ceiling at 100 the week of the Trail Moleiro race, the hardest single stimulus of the block, then settled as the body absorbed it. Fitness Base ticked from 62 to 68 and held there. Load Management sat at 95 the entire time: a lot of training, very little of it ragged. The score did not push him to do more. It watched a patient build land.
Race day
A Freita does not get easier because the spring was good. The mountain is the same 7,000 metres for everyone, the same technical descents, the same long hours. What changes is who shows up at the start: the runner who has already done the three-hour climbs in the heat, who rehearsed the eating and the hiking and the descending, who built the base instead of chasing a number. In late June, that runner toes the line in the Serra da Freita.
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Boa sorte na Serra da Freita, Bento. Corre a preparação que treinaste.