Daily suggestions for mountain marathon?

I am not an expert (a cyclist rather than a runner, not a coach, not even racing - just training to do more and faster), but I would not hold my breath.

From my use and analysis of periodized training plans set up by professionals, I would expect some alignment to the type and length of the event to come in the build phase, but things like optimizing for climbs vs others to really only appear in the roofing phase. Furthermore, from my observation and use of daily workout suggestions, I would expect changes in the types of workouts (base, threshold, etc.) being offered and their overall load, but probably not more than that.

Still, when I am training to improve my climbing, my training plans don't typically assume climbing a particular mountain, but simply involve a lot of threshold (including over/under and similar) workouts, including long threshold intervals in the roofing phase. To my understanding this is to improve my functional threshold and teach me how to pace those long climbs.

If you really care about a particular event and want the best possible adaptation, or you just care about every detail in your training, I would recommend getting a professional coach, even a remote one. If you don't want to spend money on a coach but you want an advanced experience, get a periodized training plan created by a professional coach and follow it.

I do use recommended workouts myself, but I consider them to be a suggestion on how to maintain and improve my fitness while I am not ready to follow a more strict plan. I feel that suggested workouts are generally more lightweight than following a fixed plan and still somewhat random - like my Edge and Forerunner proposing quite different workouts despite having access to the same data. I admit that I did not set any events and I imagine setting them might help with better periodization. Still, I think it's good to go through (or at least carefully analyse) a fixed plan to be able to critically evaluate suggested workouts. Like are your suggested threshold intervals really in your threshold zone? Mine are not :-)

Hey Marcin! Thanks for your very detailed answer. Totally see your point. I agree, if I want to be serious about it, an actual coach would be best for sure! I had a coach in the past actually, now I have a somewhat good feeling what I need to do to get better, so I´m coaching myself basically for this race. Works quite well. In addition, the Forerunner was giving me quite interesting workouts so I got curious and started following them – but also tweaked and changed here and there. And especially for a mountain race with almost 3000m of climbing I personally feel I really need to climb a lot, not "only" threshold workouts (but also for building the muscles, get used to the up/down pounding, the terrain, etc). It was also part of the professional training plans I did in the past, a quite essential part. That´s why I am wondering that it´s not coming up at all in the Garmin suggestions. I feel it´s just catered more towards street running, not for trail running. Well, I will find it out along the way, will do my mountain workouts anyway, whether Garmin suggests it or not. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!

Hi Manuel,

if you train for a mountain race, I would suggest to configure the recommended workouts to be heart-rate and time based (e.g. 60min @ around 150 bpm vs 1h @ 6min/km pace). The watch will never explicitly tell you to do some vert, but if you configure it like this you can at least do the recommended workouts with some vert in them without the watch yelling at you about the pace (or having to do insane duration to get the required total distance).

From a training stand point as you progress towards your race you should get more and more specific (similar to the race), in duration, pace, vert, etc. When you are still 2 months or more out it is fine to train very unspecific (e.g. flat instead of mountains) - at that point you only need to get fit in general.

Keeping this in mind, do more and more training runs on terrain similar to what you expect in the race as the race gets closer. E.g. if it says 4x8min @ threshold heart-rate, you can do them up a hill, if you have one large enough. As a side note I would also recommend some fast downhill running maybe 10 days before the race, to get nice and sore quads and have some protection against this damage in the race.

Definitively you should take all of garmins opinions and suggestions with regards to long distance mountain running with a grain of salt, there are some very wrong calculations being done by these algorithms when you train for these types of races, the worst offenders I have come accross are:

- Garmins pace calculation are worthless on hills, and will suggest inhuman (past world-record) uphill paces and very slow down-hill and flat to compensate. I have a post about it here https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/running-multisport/f/forerunner-965/335446/pacepro-how-broken-is-pace-pro-with-elevation-e-g-trailrunning

- Training load calculation for low intensity long efforts is very low, while high intensity efforts are valued as extremely strenuous. If you do a lot of slow long runs (which you should do close to a mountain marathon), do not believe it when the watch tells you your load is low. I just come back from a 10 days running training camp in the mountains, and all my other tools such as runalyze and simply looking at hours, elevation gain and distance, and of course my feeling, say this has been a very high load. Garmin is telling me my load is below the optimal range.

Hi Fredderic,

sorry for my late reply!

Thanks so much for sharing your experience! This helps a lot!!!

I have very similar thoughts and was already guessing that Garmin might never come up with workouts with vertical, now I know it´s true ;-) Also I was wondering about Garmin calculations for hill pace and effort/load – really does not make much sense.

It seems, with the next update the FR 965 will get a nex metric from the Fenix line: "Enhanced Hill Score" 
(read it here: https://the5krunner.com/2023/06/02/garmin-965-955-new-features-inbound/)

This might indicate that they are also focusing more on giving useful numbers for mountain running. Also with my last update the race time estimation for my mountain race dropped significantly (aka became more realistic ;-)) ... with those things happening, let´s hope that Garmin get´s better with adjusting their algos also for mountain trail running ... 

Thanks again!

Cheers,
Manuel

You are welcome

The enhanced hill score to me is a sad story, this is a feature that I see almost no practical use for. The very practical uses of getting pacing, navigation and load estimation right for trail running have not been changed/improved in a very long time, and it seems like Garmin has a policy to never improve/fix exsting features, only to add new things.

Uh, ah ok, did not look into the enhanced hill score yet ... sounds disappointing though.

Hi morey!

You are asking very much the same question as the person who created the thread, so I would recommend reading the responses to get a detailed answer. The short is that there is no vert in the training plan, but you can switch the plan to heart-rate based (instead of pace) and do some vert as part of the prescribed hours.

I didn't ask a question.  I was kinda' confirming the answer.

Fredderic said:

Hi morey!

You are asking very much the same question as the person who created the thread,