In three weeks, @jruddy lines up for The Lap: 75 kilometres of trail with 2,100 metres of climbing. The longest run in his entire build was two and a half hours. Much of his hardest work happened indoors, on a trainer, in sessions his plan scripts like bike races.
That mismatch is exactly why I wanted to feature him. There is a version of ultra preparation that is all mountain weekends and 100-kilometre training weeks, and most people cannot live inside it. His build looks nothing like that. It is a handful of sessions a week: runs prescribed by heart rate, bike intervals prescribed by power, strength work holding the frame together. Just over 40 percent of his completed training load this summer came on a bike. All of it is pointed at a start line that asks for none of those things and all of them at once.
The dress rehearsal
A week ago he raced Ilkley Skyline, a 35-kilometre trail race he had planted in the calendar as a B event, three weeks and a day before The Lap. He ran it in 3 hours and 7 minutes, 792 metres of climbing, 263 TSS. For scale, that single morning was more than two and a half times the training load of anything else in his block, and his fitness (CTL) jumped seven points overnight.
That is what a rehearsal is for. Not the fitness, although the fitness came too, but the answer to the question every ultra runner carries into a taper: does the engine actually work outside, on real ground, for hours? It does.
A build that kept getting interrupted
The block itself was never clean. A three-week holiday in June took the structure away, and the plan re-entered through easy aerobic work rather than pretending nothing had happened. A bout of illness in late July pulled it back to recovery runs for a few days. The two biggest weeks of the whole build sit either side of those interruptions, which tells you something about how it absorbed them.
Inside those weeks the work is specific. Near-two-hour threshold runs, 99 TSS apiece, repeated a week apart in early August. A 92-minute set of descending threshold blocks on the bike, the single biggest session of the block at 101 TSS. Two and a half hours of low, patient aerobic running at the end of July, the longest run he did. He trains on a Pyramidal model: a wide easy base, a steady band of threshold, a little sharp work on top. And he runs the plan in auto mode, letting it adjust itself around his recovery; it has adapted his week eleven times this build, and every adjustment with a recorded outcome has landed well.
There is a detail in his files I keep smiling at. His trainer sessions come through with a story attached: an attack, a 46-minute solo time trial at threshold, a sprint finish. A runner doing his hard aerobic work as an imaginary breakaway, indoors, with a COROS watch and Zwift stitching it together.
What the score noticed
| Week | Total | Overload |
|---|---|---|
| May 24 | 60 | 35 |
| Jul 5 | 70 | 100 |
| Jul 12 | 67 | 100 |
| Aug 16 | 59 | 50 |
Overload sat at 100 in the two biggest weeks of July: the score registering a build doing real building. The easing since is not decline, it is sequencing; the block ended, the race landed, and the taper began. As I write this, his total sits at 73, the highest of his entire build, because the race is being absorbed instead of buried under more work.
Three weeks out
From here the plan steps down deliberately: a recovery week, two taper weeks, race week. It ends with an easy run the day before The Lap and a recovery spin the day after, because the plan already knows the day itself will be enormous. Seventy-five kilometres is more than twice the distance he just raced.
Watch the snapshot after September 12. A build like this one, made of ordinary weeks, interruptions included, is about to be cashed out on one very long day. That is the number I will be looking for.
You can follow @jruddy at intervalcoach.app/p/jruddy, and see the shape of your own build on your Analytics page. If you would like to be featured in a future spotlight, reply to any IntervalCoach email and say so. The athletes in this series are real, the numbers are theirs, and the work is the point.