Training for a 200 miler

Divide 200 prep: Week 1, Phase 0

This year my main focus as an athlete is The Divide 200.

I’ve never touched a race longer than a 100 miles, and having settled in the Canadian Rockies this past year, the time felt right to connect deeper with the terrain I now call home by chasing something big.

The Divide covers a rugged 40,000+ft of vertical gain over 200 miles through the Canadian Rockies. It kicks off August 10 with a 100 hour cut off and a small field of only 100 athletes. Typically when I prepare for a race or large objective, my Strava flips to private and I keep the work being done pretty quiet. But I’ve had enough people ask about the preparations involved for this endeavor, and so I’ve decided to post a weekly recap of training every Sunday, so that you all reading can get some insights into what this kind of project looks like. It won't always be overly exciting, but thats probably how it should be.

Week 1, Phase 0

Planned mileage: 40 miles/completed mileage: 41.43

Planned vert: 4,000ft/completed vert: 4,088ft

Bodyweight: 216lbs

The objective of this week was honestly just to get reacquainted to working off a plan with set parameters. As someone who spends most of my time training intuitively, it felt motivating to wake up Monday and know I had certain numbers, while extremely light, to hit. I’ve been in a pretty low mileage maintenance period for a while now, so the first few weeks of this build will be pretty gentle and underwhelming from a stats perspective (that will change lol).

Stoke was high even though the weather was cold and the conditions were mostly icy. I spent 5 days in the gym, 2 climbing and 5 days on foot. Body felt great, brain is loving having something tangible to chase and part of me wants to fast forward to when the plan calls for 120 mile weeks and 30,000ft of gain, but the path must be followed and so I shall follow it.

Next week is a very minor bump, an extra 5 miles and 1k of gain. It’ll be another easy week, but it’ll reinforce the headspace around what this is going to take: I am going to need to show up, a lot, for a long time, and hurt, over long miles in brutal mountains. I know I’m sitting heavy right now, so a lot of the empty space in the week will be spent on the BikeErg and trying not to stuff my face, while I slowly transition my strength training sessions to less days a week and lighter load/higher volume work. Ideally I think I’ll sit around 200lbs on race day, but that final number is still a little TBD. 200 miles at 200lbs sounds kinda dope though.

It will be glorious and awful and I can’t wait to see what I learn about life along the way.

Onward, Always.