The Beginner’s Guide to Ultra-Marathon Training (Without Losing Your Life Outside Running)

Training for your first ultra is a brilliant mix of excitement, confusion, and occasional panic-Googling. The sport looks intimidating from the outside, huge distances, long weekends, headtorches, backpacks, fuelling strategies, and a world of social media with the strong opinions of fast looking people all contradicting each other.

But here’s the truth: you don’t need a complicated plan or endless hours of training. You need structure, patience, and a training load you can actually sustain around work, family, and having something that resembles a life.

Eddie Sutton has helped runners take their first steps into ultra-running, but also enjoy long careers in the sport, full of bucket list races and years of consistent training.

This guide breaks down the essentials so you can train well without burning out and gives an insight into the kind of support you could get from a coach.

1. Start with weekly hours, not mileage

Beginners do best when training is measured in hours, not miles. Your body doesn’t know miles, it knows stress. And the amount of physical stress on a run increases from vertical gain, mud, weather, life or a headwind that turns around when you do.

An 8-mile muddy trail run is not the same as an 8-mile road run. A progression run after a full day of work, in the rain, isn’t the same as on a sunny Saturday morning after a lie in.

So we suggest thinking in time, not distance, if setting your own training.

Some ideas to target:

• Beginner: 4-8 hours/week
• Busy runner: 4-6 hours/week (can still be enough to finish an ultra)
• Enthusiastic beginner with time: 8-10 hours/week

This gives you predictable training stress without obsessing about numbers, and you can build up over time.

2. Build your long run slowly, but consistently

Coach Eddie believes that “building the long run, this is where you need to be super cautious, with more free time at the weekend and a smorgasbord of races and trails it's too easy to go too far too fast”. Beginners often worry they need to be hitting huge distances early, but ultra training doesn’t work like that.

What matters is that, on average, your long runs feel manageable, not monumental. Each one should leave you feeling like you could have gone a bit further, not like you’ve emptied the tank.

“Studies have shown you are more likely to get injured from the long run load to overall weekly load,” highlights Eddie, “so try not to just be a weekend warrior, but look at the overall volume of the week as being more important than the long run on its own”.

Think of your long runs as gentle expansions of your comfort zone. Every few weeks you nudge the duration up slightly, allowing your body to adapt without overwhelming it. A long run that’s too long, too soon will chew into the rest of your week and disrupt the consistency that actually builds your fitness.

Don’t compare your long run to what other runners post online. Terrain, experience, fatigue, lifestyle stress, all of these make a huge difference to how long you should run.

Focus on choosing a duration that feels like a stretch, not a strain. If you finish tired but steady, hungry but not hollow, and ready to run again in a day or two, you’re right where you need to be.

The real goal of the long run isn’t hitting a particular number, it’s learning how to stay relaxed, fuel well, move smoothly, and feel confident spending time on your feet. Build it gradually, listen to your body, and let your endurance expand at its own pace.

3. Include one “moderately challenging” session per week

Ultra-runners don’t need brutal speed work. They need a touch of controlled intensity to build strength and efficiency. A little bit of faster running sharpens your technique, improves running economy, and strengthens tissues in ways slow miles can’t.

A caveat here from Eddie, “If you can’t recover from a session, or it's taking you too long to recover then you might be better running all easy miles. At least until you have the foundation built to sustain the faster work on top”.

It also keeps your stride feeling alive when the rest of your training is mostly aerobic cruising. Think of it as seasoning rather than the main course, just enough to add flavour, not so much that it overwhelms the whole dish.

Some options:

• Hill intervals: 6–10 × 45–60 sec at hard effort
• Threshold blocks: 2-3 × 8–10 minutes at controlled discomfort
• Progression runs: 40-60 minutes and finish the last 20 minutes slightly quicker
• Strides: 6–10 × 15 sec fast, relaxed at the end of an easier run.

There are plenty of different types of session and workout, these are just some examples that you could try for yourself (or work with a coach who has a few more ideas).

4. Start fuelling practice from the first long run

The gut is a trainable organ, but you need to put the work in to teach it what you expect on race day. Just like your legs adapt to long runs, your digestive system adapts to taking in fuel at effort, but only if you practise regularly. The more consistently you train with carbs, fluids, and different textures, the more reliable your stomach becomes when you’re hours deep into an ultra. Treat gut training as part of the session, not an optional extra.

It’s worth beginning fueling on runs over 90 minutes. If you haven’t done this before then below is a place to start:

• Start at 30g carbs/hour
• Build towards 45-60g/hour
• Mix textures (gels/chews/drinks)
• Practice regularly

Fuelling isn’t optional in ultras, but there is a huge bundle of knowledge and support out there compared to 10-20 years ago. Our coaches all have personal and professional experience of what the best snacks are.

Remember at the Centurion Ultrarunning Store we stock a huge range of sports hydration and nutrition options to help you fuel to success. Check out the range here.

5. Get comfortable with self-doubt

Beginners often think they’re the only ones who worry. Absolutely not.Every ultra runner, even the ones with decades of experience, has those familiar thoughts:

• “Am I doing enough?”
• “Why does everyone else seem fitter?”
• “Am I ready for this?”

You are. Self-doubt is a feature, not a flaw. It’s a normal response to doing something big and unfamiliar. What matters is how you handle it.

When those thoughts pop up, bring your focus back to what you are doing, the consistent runs, the small wins, the steady progress. Keep a simple training log of positives: sessions completed, fuelling practised, niggles managed, good decisions made. Evidence calms the mind far better than motivation does.

And talk to someone, a coach, a training partner, or another runner. Sharing doubts takes the edge off them. Almost always, the person you tell will say, “Me too,” and suddenly the worry loses its power. Self-doubt means you care and you’re paying attention. Channel it into smarter training rather than letting it question your worthiness.

In summary

Training for your first ultra doesn’t require superhuman mileage or quitting your job, it just needs structure, patience, and habits you can actually sustain.

For those who want the latest hack or short cut, Eddie wants you to remember “there really is no secret sauce to becoming a durable and successful runner apart from stacking consistency over time, keeping most of your miles easy and remembering good food and early bed times are your number one training companions!”

Focus on steady weekly hours, sensible long runs that don’t wreck your week, a small dose of controlled intensity, and short, regular strength and mobility. Practice fuelling early, give yourself cutback weeks, and remember that self-doubt is universal. Even the runners who look like mountain goats on Strava have wobbles.

If you keep showing up with consistency rather than heroics, you’ll be surprised how quickly your endurance grows. And if it all still feels like a puzzle with missing pieces, well… that’s exactly what coaches are for.

At the very least, they can reassure you that you don’t need to buy four pairs of trail shoes in your first month…