Running

Ha, right. Here's me who has only ever done a slow half marathon giving advice to someone on a ultra plan.

But I'll try anyway! That plan follows the typical good advice for quality/quantity. There's an intervals run (mixed with the hilly runs) on a Wednesday. There's a long run (Saturday) and a tempo-ish run on a Sunday, and the rest is easy and optional easy runs (plus some cross training and core work).

Those plans are great if you can fit them straight into your schedule, but as you're finding out they don't often do that. I took my plan (an intermediate marathon plan from the bupa website) and rejigged it to fit my schedule as I work from home a couple of days a week, work in the office two days a week and have school drop-off/collections to fit in too, plus I didn't want to lose so much family time at the weekends.

Looking at that plan the key things seem to be:

• A long run followed the next day by a hour tempo-ish run
  
• An easy run followed next day by a hilly run or hill intervals, followed next day by another easy run. These are separated from the long and tempo runs.
  
  

As long as you keep these key features then you should be able to rejig it to fit your schedule.

The long run has to remain a single long run, splitting it up between commute in and commute home won't have the same training effect as it won't have you running on the right level of fatigued legs.

The problem with Tue/Wed/Thu for your easy/hilly/easy runs is that I guess it's hard to make a Wednesday commute hilly, or do hill repeats, so, what about moving the whole plan 4 days forward (i.e. the long run on Saturday you now do on a Tuesday):-

• Tue: Long run (extend your commute into work or home from work), reward yourself with the train/bus/tube/boris-bike the other way. Can be an early start but extending my commute into a HM really works for me (once a month or so)
  
• Wed: 1 hour medium effort run (in to work, extend your commute if required, or recovery jog the remaining distance after the hour is up if it's longer than an hour), easy run home
  
• Thu: easy run in, possibly easy run home if you're up to it or get public transport home
  
• Fri: 45-60 min easy run
  
• Sat: Hilly run or hill repeats (this was Wednesday)
  
• Sun: 1:15 to 1:30 easy plus core
  
• Mon: off or easy swim/jog
  
  

Will take some rejigging near the end of the 16 week plan in order to taper correctly, but as long as you're only adding easy runs as extra runs you should be fine (assuming your legs/mind can take it).

A 20+mile long run on the way in or home from work may take a bit of willpower (as opposed to having the whole of a Saturday to do it) but if you can do it and shift the plan by 4 days then it leaves you loads of nice recovery time over the weekend as you'll just have two shortish (in ultra terms) runs to do on Saturday and Sunday.