Six Plan Templates, Built Around Real Ultra Races

A road 50K and a 100-mile mountain race are both ultras. They share almost nothing else. The road race rewards speed and pace discipline. The mountain race rewards climbing strength, downhill control, and the ability to keep moving through cumulative fatigue. Training for one with a plan built for the other is how runners end up either underprepared or overcooked.

So we rebuilt RunPact's plan generator around templates — opinionated, purpose-built blueprints that define what a training cycle should actually look like for a specific kind of race. Six of them ship as official RunPact templates, and you pick the one that matches the race you're training for.

What a Template Actually Is

A template isn't a fixed week-by-week plan. It's the structural DNA of a plan: which phases exist, how long each one runs, what mix of sessions belongs in each phase, how aggressively volume ramps, how recovery weeks land, and how terrain demands shape the workouts. The plan generator takes that blueprint and combines it with your weekly hours, training days, and race date to produce a personalized plan.

That separation matters. The template encodes the training philosophy. Your inputs personalize the execution.

The Six Templates

Periodized Ultra Plan

The complete blueprint. Five phases — transition, base, build, peak, taper — covering up to 27 weeks. Builds aerobic capacity first, layers in quality, peaks with race-specific sessions, then tapers cleanly. Suitable for any 50K through 100-mile target when you have the time to do the full cycle.

Base Builder

An aerobic-only block. Zero hard sessions. High-volume easy running and progressive long runs, nothing else. Use it as an off-season block, a return-from-injury ramp, or the first chapter of a longer plan. Up to 18 weeks.

Mountain & Vert

For races with serious climbing. Higher terrain multipliers, frequent hill repeat sessions, back-to-back long runs in the build phase, and dedicated downhill training in the peak. Volume runs higher and the quality work is terrain-specific. Built for alpine and technical trail events. Up to 30 weeks.

Race-Sharpening Block

A concentrated 10–17 week quality block. No base phase — you should already be running comfortably at your target weekly volume before starting. High intensity percentage, frequent intervals, tempo, fartlek, and race simulations. Designed for athletes with an existing aerobic base who need to sharpen for a target race.

Flat Ultra

Optimized for road ultras and flat trail races where speed matters more than vertical. Tempo, intervals, and fartlek sessions take priority; hill work is minimal. 10–22 weeks. Built for road 50Ks, flat 50-milers, and any event where pace is your primary weapon.

Rolling Hills Ultra

The middle ground. Balanced quality and hill work for mixed-terrain races with moderate but sustained climbing — the kind of course that punishes anyone who neglects either speed or vertical. 13–27 weeks. Ideal for trail 50Ks and 50-milers with 1,000–3,000m of gain.

Why This Was Worth Doing

Before this, plan generation was driven by terrain profile flags and a pile of hardcoded defaults scattered across the rule engine. Tuning a plan for a different kind of race meant editing Python. Adding a new training philosophy meant editing more Python.

Now every parameter that shapes a plan — phase lengths, volume caps, recovery week frequency, quality percentage, terrain multipliers, elevation per session type, the full session menu for each phase — lives in the template config. The rule engine reads from the template. Nothing about the training philosophy is buried in code anymore.

That refactor unlocked two things. First, the six official templates above could exist as real, distinct plans rather than minor variations of one master plan. Second, you can build your own.

Community Templates

If none of the official six fits your situation, you can create a custom template, save it, and optionally share it publicly. Other runners can use it to generate their own plans. Coaches can codify their methodology as a template and hand it to athletes. The template chooser splits cleanly into RunPact's official set and a community section so the two never get mixed up.

Owners can edit and delete their own templates. Templates that are actively powering someone's training plan can't be deleted out from under them.

Where We Are

Plan generation now picks the right phases, the right session mix, and the right ramp from a template that was built for the race you're actually targeting. The six official templates cover the vast majority of ultra training scenarios. The custom-template path is open for everything else.

If you've tried RunPact before and bounced off because the plan didn't fit your race, this is the change that's worth a second look.