Hi All,
Looking for some advice on choosing a training plan for some summer 2021 goals. My main goal event is a mid-August trail race in the Cascades that is around 40 miles and 9,000′ gain. As intermediate goals over the summer I have a trail half-marathon scheduled in April (13 miles, ~1500′ gain) and a 4-day Rainier climb (Emmons Glacier route) at the end of May.

I am coming in with a pretty solid base of 1 year of consistent running (around 25 miles per week) and hiking (typically 1 per week with 3-4000’gain) which I used for training for a 6-day Mountaineering course and climb on Baker (included 8 weeks of ME work leading up to this).

I am debating between the intro to ultra-running plan and the big vert plan. Both the vertical gain and distance of my goal event will be larger than I have done in the past and are a similar percentage increase of my prior 1-day maximums (about 3x for each).

My thoughts were to use the Big Vert plan as I think the ME work in that will carry over well to my mountaineering objectives (and use some more mountaineering specific ME work in the period prior to my climb), but wondering if others may think that the intro to ultra-running plan would suite my goal event better?

Thanks for any input, really appreciate all the amazing information you put out here.