4-5 week training plan for Alps

Hi all,

Hope everyone is enjoying the summer, wherever you are. I’m trying to figure out a short training plan of 4-5 weeks ahead of a planned trip to the Alps at the end of July/early August.

In 2021 I did my first marathon (road) and ultra (60km, trail) and on 28 May I did a trail marathon with about 600 mm of vert, but on often awkward and rocky terrain. Training volume wasn’t huge in the run up to those events, probably averaged about 30km per week over the cycle, mainly because of work getting in the way, with my focus being on getting out for a long hilly run at the weekend (20km) and short runs + strength training during the week.

I intended to just have 2 weeks rest after the trail marathon, but that turned into 4, and now I have 5 weeks leading up to a planned trip to the Alps that I want to train for. There’s no real competitive goal to the trip, just to have two long, beautiful days out in the mountains, probably a mix of walking the uphills and running the downhills/flats. It will no doubt involve a lot more vert than we did in our last training cycle, and while I have plenty of experience with long days with 1000 metre + vert hiking on tough terrain here in Ireland, it’s been a while.

So I’m sitting here trying to make out a training plan for the next four weeks. I’m looking at starting off at 30km and building up to 40km for “race week”, which would allow for two good days out in the mountains on our trip. A few questions come to mind though

– Am I doing too much starting at 30km, given that was the average of my last training cycle, at 4 weeks off? It still seems like a relatively small distance to be starting on though
– Can I get away with skipping a recovery week in this brief cycle, or perhaps I can use the 5 days (Sun-Thurs) preceding our weekend trip as a loner recovery period, while still being able to get in big training days each weekend preceding that?
– should I perhaps nix the focus on distance and just switch to time + vertical for this plan?

The trip is a bit last minute, so I am still researching exactly where we are staying and what trails will be available there.

Would love to hear any thoughts or suggestions. Thanks for reading.

Lenny