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If you just finished your big race and don't have the next one picked, it's hard to know what to do with the months in between. Here's how I built my plan for the rest of the year, and the questions behind it, so you can borrow whatever's useful for your own.

Grindstone was a month ago. The quads have come back (more on that here), and for the first time this year there's nothing on the calendar.

I'm eyeing the Burning River 50 miler for 2027, but I'm open to other options. The working assumption is another ultra next year, with real training starting in the spring. That leaves the rest of this year with no race to aim at.

Four things:

Everything in the plan traces back to one of those.

The main job is keeping my body used to the mileage. If a longer ultra is coming in 2027, I want to walk into spring with a solid base of Zone 2 miles and jump straight into ultra training, not spend the first month rebuilding.

So the plan holds 40 to 50 miles a week, and almost all of it is easy. Every week has the same shape:

The long run builds from 10 miles in October to 15 the week before Christmas, all at an easy effort. No trail trips, no fueling practice, nothing race-specific. Just miles. A down week comes around every few weeks, and two of them land on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Two 20-minute sessions a week, built around the functional strength Jason Koop recommends for ultrarunners in Training Essentials for Ultrarunning.

The reasons are simple. I'm in my 40s, and strength work matters for aging and longevity. It lowers the odds of getting hurt. And it mixes things up.

Session A: lower body, slow on the way down. Bulgarian split squats, goblet squats, step-downs off a box, single-leg Romanian deadlifts, calf raises, and Copenhagen planks. Everything lowers on a three count. The slow lowering is there for downhill durability, and my quads after Grindstone made a decent case for it.

Session B: power, carries and core. Kettlebell swings, suitcase carries, push-ups, single-arm rows, dead bugs, and side planks.

Between the two, it touches all five of Koop's movement patterns: push, pull, hinge, squat, and carries and core. Carries and core is the pattern I admitted to letting slide in my strength post this summer.

Tuesday is the one hard day. October opens with strides, short and smooth at the end of an easy run. After that, two kinds of workouts alternate through December:

The point is VO2max and anaerobic fitness, which a winter of easy miles won't keep on its own. The hills are good strength for my legs, too. One hard day a week, and everything else stays easy.

On paper the plan is detailed. Every day has a workout and a distance. That's on purpose. It gives me something to work toward.

But it's flexible, and I plan to use that. I'll work around the holidays. I'll miss days. The whole thing is meant to stay easier than a full race build.

Some of that is built in. Christmas Day is a full rest day. Thanksgiving is an easy run or a turkey trot, whichever sounds better that morning. And if my legs feel flat, the first thing to go is the Bulgarian split squats, not the run.

If you're building your own off-season, these are the questions I started with:

The plan runs to the new year. Then I'll take stock: where my fitness is, whether anything is on the calendar yet, and what the next training block should look like.

Until then, the job is getting the miles in and enjoying the winter.