Last week I went through Koop's Training Essentials for Ultrarunning. This week is what happens after you close the book.

The principles, at least, are clear: block your training, don't blend it. Build toward your race. The work that looks most like race day goes last. Koop hands you the framework. What he doesn't hand you is a plan for a mountain 50k trained out of flat Ohio with three kids and a full-time job.

So I built one. This is how that went.

What I Borrowed From Koop

I won't re-examine the book here; that was last week. But a few ideas did most of the heavy lifting, and one of them shaped the entire plan.

Block training. This was the big one. Instead of running a little bit of everything every week for sixteen weeks straight, you sequence the work into focused blocks, each with a single job. You build one quality, lock it in, then move on to the next. It goes hand in hand with specificity — the idea that your training should gradually come to resemble your race — because blocks let you save the most race-specific work for last, when it counts, instead of smearing it thinly across the whole calendar.

For me that's three blocks and a taper, and the order isn't random — Koop's idea is to bookend the training. You start with the quality that looks least like the race and finish with the one that looks most like it. So intervals come first: short, fast, the least race-like work there is, done up front while my legs are fresh and race day is far enough off that I can afford to be tired. Endurance comes last — long, climbing-heavy days built to resemble Grindstone, even from Ohio. That leaves the middle block for everything in between: steady-state and tempo runs, the bridge from raw speed to race-day endurance.

Most weeks follow roughly the same shape: a couple of easy days, one or two key sessions, another easy day, a long run. Five or six runs total, and only one or two of them are actually hard. What changes block to block is what those hard sessions look like — short intervals in the first block, sustained tempo and steady-state work in the middle, long climbing days in the last. The easy days aren’t filler; they’re what makes the hard sessions count. Show up to an interval workout already tired and you’ve mostly wasted it. The block names the target quality. The easy running is what makes it stick.

Time on feet over mileage. For an ultra, how long I'm out there matters more than what the watch says. That quietly changed my long runs from "hit the number" to "stay out there."

That's the skeleton. The rest was adapting it to a life Koop has never met.

The Shape of the Blocks

The plan breaks into three blocks and a taper across the sixteen weeks between now and race day — intervals first, steady-state and tempo work in the middle, race-specific endurance at the end. Here's the emphasis, week by week:

The order is the whole point. Intervals go first because they're least like the race and easiest to build while I'm fresh. Endurance goes last because that's the work I want sharpest on race day. The middle is the bridge — steady-state and tempo runs that turn raw speed into something I can hold for hours.

The Flat-State Problem

Here's the obvious one: Grindstone is a mountain race, and I live somewhere with the elevation profile of a parking lot. Avon Lake does not have hills. It has gentle suggestions of hills.

So my climbing is going to come from a treadmill cranked to an incline that makes the machine groan and probably makes my neighbors wonder what's happening in my basement at 5am. It is not glamorous. It's hiking uphill to nowhere, sweating onto a deck that doesn't move, staring at a wall. But it's the most specific tool I've got, and specificity wins. I'd rather show up at Grindstone having done my vert badly than not at all.

This is the part of the plan I'm most likely to dread and most likely to skip. I know that about myself going in, which is half the battle.

The Plan Is Also A Testing Lab

The other thing this plan is quietly doing is sorting out what I'll put on my feet and in my stomach when it actually counts. Race day is a terrible time to learn anything new, so the goal is to make all my discoveries now.

Socks. I've got a small rotation going and I'm putting them on different runs to see what survives long miles and sweat without turning my feet into a problem. Opinions are forming. A full breakdown is coming.

Shoes. I'm testing two trail shoes side by side: the Altra Lone Peak and the Saucony Peregrine. They're different animals — the Lone Peak is roomy and flat underfoot, the Peregrine is more aggressive and structured. I genuinely don't know yet which one my feet are going to want at mile 20 of a mountain race. Which is the whole point of finding out now, on a Tuesday, instead of guessing on race morning.

Nutrition. This is the one I respect the most and trust the least. Koop is big on training your gut, and he's right — the stomach is trainable, and a 50k is a bad place to discover your fueling plan doesn't sit well. GI distress is a leading DNF cause. So I'm practicing eating on the run now, on the long days, while the worst-case outcome is an uncomfortable morning instead of a long walk back to the car.

The thread running through all of it: nothing new on race day. Which means everything has to get old before then.

Here's the honest part. The plan exists. It's on the calendar, color-coded, almost suspiciously tidy. It's also already wrong in a few places, and I knew it before I finished building it.

I can see the collisions from here. There's a hard week sitting right on top of a work deadline. There's a long run parked on a Saturday I already owe to a kid's baseball tournament. The plan quietly assumes a version of me with more open mornings than the calendar actually allows.

I'm trying not to read that as failure. The plan isn't a contract — it's a best guess made in May about a body and a life that'll keep changing right up to race day. The job isn't to run it perfectly. It's to protect the parts that matter when a week comes apart, and to not go dark when one does. A hard hill session can shrink to an easy walk. A two-hour long run can become ninety minutes. The only miss I can't come back from is quitting because it got messy.

That's probably a whole post of its own. Another time.

So that's the plan: Koop's principles, bent around a flat state, a full house, and a body that's 45 and has its own opinions about recovery. Hills on a treadmill. Socks and shoes on trial. A stomach in training. And a summer calendar I already know I'll be editing by week three.

Grindstone doesn't care how the plan looked in May. It only cares what I did about it between now and the start line.

Questions about how any of this was built? Please comment. I’ll be checking back in as the weeks go. The plan looks clean on paper. The paper hasn’t run any hills yet.