Part 1 – In the beginning…
There’s a well-known Chinese proverb drawn from Lau Tzu’s ancient philosophical writings in the Tao Te Ching: ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. See….proof 👇
This can apply to any daunting task or effort and is used by people to ‘‘get started’ or ‘do something’. You know, the ironing pile is taller than you and everyone in the house is going around like they’re in a 90’s shellsuit (crumply much?). Taking the single step is picking out a t-shirt and getting moving on the smoothing! Sometimes, however, the quote takes a more literal meaning. For us distance runners, whilst our long meandering journeys are unlikely to be a thousand miles, they often reach levels that most people would put in the same ballpark. That is, a ridiculously long way. Never has this been truer for me than this week. Why? What did I do? I did this 👇
That’s right – I am running the West Highland Way ultra in 2025 🤪! If you don’t know the West Highland Way ultra, it is officially advertised as 95 miles/153km in distance. So it’s not quite the one thousand miles Lao Tzu refers to, but for reference, Scotland at it’s longest is measured at 274 miles/441km. So I’ll be taking in over a third of the country😅. Those 95 magic (or mad?) miles come with 14,760ft (approx. 4500m) of elevation across very rugged trail terrain in the Scottish Highlands. It starts at 1am (that’s 1 in the MORNING in case you thought that was a typo!). Fair to say it’s going to be a tough beast to tame (is there a similar but more vegan expression? – answers on a postcard…).
Current run fitness
The ‘race’ – which for me means against the 35 hour cut-off time and my body or mind rebelling, whichever comes first 😅 – kicks off in just under 28 weeks. Despite being an experienced health and fitness professional and avid runner (you can read more in my bio), I have not trained running intensely since May when I completed a 12-hour ultra. But that one was flat, and I topped out at 65 miles by the time 12-hours were up. Instead I have enjoyed the benefits of cross training (you might have heard of Hyrox? If not…where have you been 😆). So there’s a lot of general fitness, and plenty of residual running fitness. Yet still, 28-weeks to train for a 95 miler that ascends over half the elevation of Mount Everest, is a daunting challenge!
Developing a West Highland Way ultra training plan
You might have heard the saying, ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’ (attributed to different people so who knows who said it first 🤷♀️). Well I do love a fitness training planning session! So I spent last Sunday afternoon cooried (snuggled up, for all the non Scots speakers) under the duvet with tea, laptop, running books and good old pen and paper. Oh, and the dogs, obviously, because how dare I get space to spread my stuff out 🙄.
The West Highland Way ultra 2025 umbrella plan is set. 28 weeks of building endurance, speed, hill power, physical strength, mental toughness, nutrition approaches, recovery, etc. All whilst managing life and work around it, because I know from experience that those things don’t stop and wait 😅. I’ll also need to gather and train some support crew…they are part of the mandatory kit for this one 😆.
I will be documenting the highs, the lows, the meh’s, and maybe even some ugly crying 😭. I will share some of my training programme specifics in greater depth along the way.
Garmin stats
Garmin will be getting some airtime too. How do the relevant stats and its opinions (often uncomplimentary of herculean efforts, am I wrong?) compare with my own sense of how things are going? Given this will be a test of endurance and capacity to take on the hills, two scores that will feature heavily are Garmin’s Endurance Score and Hill Score. If you’re not sure what these are, I will explain these in an upcoming West Highland Way ultra 2025 training journey post. For now, you can see my starting numbers below. My Endurance Score currently sits at the upper end of ‘well-trained’. The Hill Score also has me down as ‘trained’ (there’s no well-trained in hill scores!). How long until I can graduate up the ranks of both, we shall see!
Endurance Score 👇
Hill Score 👇
Week 1 West Highland Way ultra training
I am part way through week 1 of training, re-building run consistency and base running fitness. I should register around 35 miles/56km. So far I have trundled out a couple of easy runs and lamented (but still did) my speed endurance session. I’ll share more on these sessions when I review the weeks training each Sunday. This coming Friday to Sunday, I will run each day. The max distance I will cover in a single day (Saturday) is 11 miles/17.7km. This will be broken into 2 runs, as I am one half of a duo responsible for organising my club (Vegan Runners UK) monthly parkrun (3.1 miles/5km) meet ups in our area, and we have one in the diary this week 💚🖤.
Follow along with my West Highland Way ultra training!
This training journey post is a quick overview to set the scene. I will delve into things in much more depth as we go. If you want to follow along and vicariously train for and complete the ridiculously long and high West Highland Way ultra, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on the socials 👇. Maybe you actually ARE doing something similar and would value some shared comradeship as you traverse your journey! Subscribe and follow too!
I’d love to have you share my West Highland Way Ultra 2025 training journey!
Shari 💚