Training Plans Built for Ultrarunners (Not Adapted from Road Running)

If you've trained for an ultra, you've probably noticed the gap.

Road running has TrainingPeaks structured plans, Garmin Coach, Nike Run Club, dozens of apps that generate periodized plans tailored to your fitness. You pick a marathon, enter your goal time, and get a plan that adjusts week by week.

Try the same thing for a 100-mile mountain race and you're on your own. Generic templates. PDF plans from coaches charging hundreds of dollars. Forum posts saying "just run more." None of it accounts for 10,000m of elevation gain, or the fact that your race has a 48-hour cutoff, or that you need back-to-back long runs on tired legs to simulate race day.

We built RunPact's training plan generator to fill that gap.

What It Does Today

RunPact generates structured training plans for ultra distances — 50k, 100k, and 100-mile races — with the specifics that matter for mountain and trail ultras.

Terrain-aware planning. Plans adjust based on the terrain profile of your target race. A flat 100k on roads gets different training than a 100k with 5,000m of climbing. The system accounts for elevation, technical terrain, and race-specific demands when building your weekly structure.

Proper periodization. Every plan follows a Base → Build → Peak → Taper structure, with the length and intensity of each phase scaled to your race distance and timeline. Base phase builds aerobic volume. Build phase adds race-specific intensity. Peak phase sharpens fitness. Taper brings you to the start line ready.

Ultra-specific sessions. This isn't a road marathon plan with longer runs bolted on. The plan includes:

• Back-to-back long runs (the Saturday/Sunday combo that teaches your body to run on tired legs)
• Hill repeat sessions calibrated to your race profile
• Progression runs that build effort through the session
• Varied interval lengths (400m to 5km) for different energy systems
• Strength and cross-training sessions placed on the right days
• Recovery structured around weekly training load

Personalized paces. Plans use your training zones to set workout intensities — easy runs, tempo efforts, intervals, and long run targets are all based on your current fitness, not generic pace tables.

Adaptive adjustments. Life happens. The plan adapts when you need to shift sessions, and the system adjusts training load so you don't lose progress or overtrain.

Honest About Where We Are

This is a beta. The plan generator works and produces solid training structures, but we're actively improving it. Some things we know aren't perfect yet:

• Workout descriptions could be more detailed in places
• The adaptation logic handles common cases but not every edge case
• We're still validating plans across the full range of runner profiles and race types

We'd rather ship something useful and improve it based on real feedback than wait until it's theoretically perfect.

What's Coming

The backlog is long because the problem space is huge. Here's what we're working toward:

Nutrition strategy. Fueling is half the battle in ultras. We want to suggest fueling points based on your course's crux sections, add hydration reminders for long training runs, and estimate calorie needs per session.

Pacing strategy. Race-specific pacing recommendations — effort distribution, negative split strategies, and adjustments for elevation changes. The goal is a pacing plan you can actually execute on race day.

Real pace integration. Right now, plans use your stated training zones. We're building auto-detection of threshold pace and heart rate from your Strava and Garmin data, so workout targets reflect your actual current fitness, not what you entered three months ago.

Plan export. Export your training plan to Garmin Connect, TrainingPeaks, Strava, Coros, Suunto, Google Calendar, or as a printable PDF. We want plans to live wherever you already track your training.

Advanced plan customization. Build your own phase structure, reorder training blocks, adjust durations, and mix workout templates. For experienced ultrarunners and coaches who know what they want.

Race-specific sessions. Night runs to practice headlamp skills. Altitude simulation sessions. Gear testing runs. Nutrition rehearsal sessions. The kind of race-specific prep that separates finishers from DNFs.

Why We're Building This

The ultra community has grown massively, but the tooling hasn't kept up. You can get a coach (expensive), buy a generic PDF plan (not personalized), or piece something together yourself (time-consuming and easy to get wrong).

There should be a tool that understands the specific demands of ultrarunning — the terrain, the fueling, the back-to-back fatigue, the multi-day recovery — and generates a real training plan around them. That's what we're building.

If you're training for an ultra and want to try it, RunPact is live. Plans are generated in minutes and you can start training immediately. It's early, it's improving fast, and your feedback directly shapes what we build next.