Lavaredo Ultra Trail: A Complete Guide to Training and Racing

The 120km:  I have done this race 4 times, with two top10 finishes and 2 DNFs, the DNFs honestly were just back luck. I was sick both times. This route is incredible and it’s for sure the best (in my opinion) Ultra Marathon in Europe.  

We should segment the race in 3 sections: 

• Start to Misurina: these are the first 40k, normally the top runners will run well under 4 hours, because this is the fastest and flatter part of the route. It’s extremely runnable, not technical at all, and it’s very easy to cover ground. There are for sure some key climbs, but honestly nothing crazy. The main climb will be to Paso Tri Crocci, just before heading down to Misurina. Take it easy in this climb, it’s too early to burn any matches. 
• Misurina to km 80: I forgot the name of the km 80 aid station. When you leave Misurina you will start a massive climb to Rifugio Auronzo, and then to the Tri Cime, this climb is very runnable actually, but it’s long, so make sure to take it easy in the beginning because the further along you are on the climb, the stepper that it gets and the higher that it gets too. Once you get to Tri Cime please look around, and absorb the best and most beautiful spot of the race, also the highest point. Then you will have a half marathon of downhill followed by a flat stretch to Cimabanche, that flat stretch can feel long, because you have to run it, kind of hard if you want to cover terrain. 
• Last Marathon: the last marathon of the race, is when the real race starts. You have to climb a section called Val Travenanses, which is an amazing climb all the way to one of the most beautiful passes of the race. Then it’s a lot of up and down, with technical sections, the most technical one is the drop just before Passo Giau, please stay alert and embrace that amazing landscape, Passo Giau is a stunning biking route, with incredible views. What a place, writing this, makes me want to do the race. After Passo Giau you have a couple of climbs left, these are steep, not very long, but steep. And then you will get to the last challenge of the race. The downhill to Cortina. This is around 12km and 1,000 meters of downhill, it’s not technical but you really need to be focused, and it can feel very long. Mainly because you already have over 100km on your legs and you want to get home. 

As we talked before, for all the Lavaredo races, speed is key. But for the 120 km event, I would suggest starting with a strong focus on Speed and Strength, adding a little bit more intention to developing those strong Mountain Legs. This block should be from 6 to 8 weeks, where your main objective is to develop your running economy and capacity of running fast without much effort and strong legs to tolerate the climbs and downhills of the race. 

To do this it’s key to: 

• Do Strides: at least twice a week, try to hit max speed on 20 to 30 seconds stride, with 1 minute recovery in between each stride. Start by doing 4 strides, and by the last part of the block you can certainly be doing 8 to 12 strides at the end of some of your runs. Ideally after an easy run, and sometimes after a longer run. 
• Strength: again, at least twice a week, I recommend doing key strength workouts. This doesn’t have to be something crazy, with 20 minutes of core + strength you will at least be covered to not get injured. You can do for example our quick 5’ strength and core routines, a couple of times, or follow one of our longer videos too. Since we already know that this distance ends with a massive descent, we should prepare your quads for it. For this exercises like sit-wall, plyometric squats and weight training can be a game changer. You can start with a classic 30 seconds wall-sit followed by 10 squats and then 5 squat jumps for example. That’s a great way to develop muscle endurance. If you need guidance on it, check out our strength coaching, starting at $39/month and guided by PT Parker Farabee. 
• Tempo runs/efforts: These are progressive runs where you can sustain an elevated effort (tempo), of around 6 or 7 of your RPE scale, for a determined period of time. We can get started with 5 minutes, ideally hitting 20 or even 30 minutes towards the end of the block. For your tempo runs, try to hit the mountain index of the race. It’s not mandatory at this stage, but it can be very helpful. The tempo efforts can be done on a flat or uphill. Imagine yourself getting to the bottom of a hill and focusing for a 20 minute climb, at a race pace or even a little faster. Same applies for that effort on a flat. 

After this first speed focused training, we will enter the more specific part of your training plan, here we’re looking at a block of at least 10 weeks, and ideally 12 to 14 weeks. Here’s where the Mountain Index becomes a priority, Lavaredo 120 km is not a flat race, it’s actually fairly steep, so the mountain index will allow you to run on similar conditions to what you will encounter on your race, making it possible for you to get familiarized with the course (even at home) so whenever the race date come, you can crush it and feel good while doing it. If you want to learn more about our Mountain Index, check out our Training App, where you can integrate your wearables (Garmin, Strava, Suunto, Coros…) and track your workouts mountain index vs the one of your race. Also, if you live in a flat place and can’t hit your race Mountain Index, our training plans are designed to help you with that, by providing you with equivalent workouts that will allow you to train in the best possible way, wherever you live, for the mountains. 

In this specific training block, I would like for you to focus on 5 pillars: High intensity, Endurance, Threshold, Strength and Nutrition. 

• High intensity (for the first 4 weeks of the block): This will be a continuation of your previous block, mainly because it’s fairly easy to win speed, and also fairly easy to lose it. We will not be doing crazy workouts but we will maintain 2x week strides, stick to 6 strides of 20 seconds each, that’s literally 10 extra minutes of training a week, you can do them on a runnable uphill or on flat. On top of this, add 1 specific high intensity/speed/Vo2 max session every week. This can range from a classic 5 by 3 minutes uphill, all out with a downhill recovery to fartlek’s sessions or the classic 1 minute on, 1 minute off. You can start with 8 of 1’ on, 1’ off and build up to 15 of those, with a warm up and cool down, you will easily hit a decent 60 minutes workout. This can evolve to more uphill and downhill focused sessions, where you can run very hard up for 2, 3, up to 5 minutes, and recover on the downhill, doing an uphill workout. For downhill it is very similar, just be careful to not fall. Normally you want to do speed towards the beginning of the week, after a day off or a rest day. This is so your body is recovered from previous long runs, allowing you to find speed and power, without tired legs. 
• Threshold (from week 4 and onward): this will be more like a sustained 6 to 15 minutes effort on a flat or a climb. Where you will be running on Zone 4 (in a 5 zone model) and never, ideally never hitting your zone 5. This effort should feel like something that you can sustain for up to 60 minutes. I recommend you to variate between Runnable uphill sessions, Steep uphill sessions and flat ones. You can do a different one every week. And stack up the efforts. Start with 4 by 6 minutes at LT, and you can develop your training to hit 4 by 15 minutes for example. You really don’t need to do more than 60 minutes of focus effort. 
• Endurance: ideally fully guided by the mountain index and I would suggest doing it, time-based. Your easy runs and your long runs are all part of this part of your training. Try to start with easy long runs, 60 minutes is great, and increase them 15% a week, up to a 6 hours long run. Which will feel very similar to a race day for you. You can also work on adding some specific sections to your long runs, for example, on a 3 hours long run, add 2 by 10 minutes uphill focused segments (at an effort a little lower than your Threshold efforts). Next week, do the same but 2 by 10 minutes downhill focused segments.  Where you will climb or decent a race-effort, during a long run. Helping you test your pacing, and feeling. This will be great even after a long week of training, because you will be doing it on tired legs. Another great way to develop endurance are back to back runs, where on Sat for example you do a 3 hours long run with focus on the climbs and on Sunday you do a 2 hours long run with focus on the downhills. 
• Strength: here you can again default to our strength videos, but I do believe that having a strength coach or strength training plan can be a game changer. Try to not do anything really heavy, you really want to develop two key things: Muscle endurance and Power. 
• Nutrition: nutrition is your pre-run, during the run, post run food, fueling, hydration, salts and minerals. Everything that will allow you to crush it on your training and also to crush it on race day. One of the key things we have learned in the last couple of years, is the massive difference that great fueling and hydration can make on your race. Honestly, it’s a game changer. To measure your fueling, focus on measuring the amount of carbs that you can ingest per hour, forget about calories and focus on carbs. If you don’t follow a carb based diet, I can’t help you much here. 

You don’t need to hit 100 or 150 gr/hour of carbs, even if that’s what a lot of people are trying to do, it may not work for you. So on this part of your training, we need to focus on finding what works for you. Start with 60gr/hour this can be a mix of gels, drink mix, solid food, whatever you like the most and go from there. I will suggest trying a new product on an easy run and long run and then the ones that you will like to use on race-day, test them on a hard workout… in the middle of a hard workout. There you will really see how you feel using that product under very hard conditions. 

For the 120k, I highly recommend trying some solid food, and also try to test what they will have in the Aid Stations… I remember in 2015, eating Nutella (yeah they have nutella on aid stations) changed my race and allowed me to finish so strong at the end. 

Regarding minerals, the only way to really know how much sodium you need is by doing a sweat test. Which is not available for everybody. So you can just test how you feel by drinking 250 mg of sodium per hour, and increase to 300 mg, 500mg… Some people lose up to 1,000 mg of sodium per hour, which is crazy. 

To structure your week of training for this race, I recommend you to focus on: 

• Hitting the high intensity workouts early on the week, like Tuesdays or Wednesdays for example. 
• Make sure to also start the week with some strength training. This can be the day before a high intensity session, this tends to work well to transfer the strength into the actual act of running. 
• Recover well before your long runs, for the marathon race, 1 long run per week is enough. 
• Add at least one very easy day a week. 
• Rest at least one day a week. 

The beauty of training with Vert is that you will have a coach that will set up all of that for you, taking out the guess work, and allowing you to focus on what really matters. Your training.