Endurance training built for a busy clinician's week — by a vet who is still working one.
Open any sixteen-week plan. Tuesday is intervals. Thursday is tempo. Saturday is long. It assumes you wake up at the same hour, finish work at a predictable time, and arrive at each session with something left.
You euthanized someone's dog at 4:40 on a Thursday and then saw three more appointments. You stayed ninety minutes past close writing records. You were on your feet for eleven hours and ate half a granola bar at 2pm. Then the plan says 8 × 800m at threshold and you skip it, and then you skip Friday because you already broke the week, and by Sunday you've decided you're not a runner right now.
The plan didn't fail because you lack discipline. It failed because it was written for someone whose calendar belongs to them.
This guide is the structure I actually used to finish a hundred-mile trail race in 23 hours while working clinically. It is not a training plan. It's the set of rules that let an imperfect week still add up.
Stop assigning workouts to weekdays. Assign them to the week and let them land where they land. A week with one long effort, one hard effort, and three easy ones is a good week whether the hard one falls on Tuesday or Friday. Fixed days are what break; weekly targets bend.
Pick the long one. Put it on the day you have the most control over — usually a day you are not on the schedule — and defend it the way you'd defend a surgery slot. Everything else in the week is negotiable. If the long run happens fifty weeks a year, you will finish the race. If it's the thing that gets moved, nothing else you do will save it.
After a twelve-hour shift, five miles is a different physiological event than five miles on a day off — same distance, more cost. Duration keeps the stress honest and stops you chasing a number on a day your body is already in debt. Forty-five minutes easy is forty-five minutes easy whether you covered four miles or six.
The session you do at 7:40pm in the clinic parking lot because you have nothing left is not a wasted session — it's the one keeping the habit alive through a bad stretch. Consistency at low volume beats a perfect week followed by three empty ones. The goal on a hard day is not to train well. It's to still be someone who trains.
Most clinicians I talk to eat once before 3pm and then wonder why their evening run felt like wading. If you ran out of energy at minute twenty, that's usually a food problem wearing a fitness costume. Eat something real in the last hour of your shift — not as a treat, as a prescription. For efforts past ninety minutes, take in carbohydrate while you move rather than after.
This is a build-phase week for someone working a normal full-time clinical schedule — five days on, plus a weekend a month. Every session is sized to what's actually left in the tank that day, not to what a plan wishes were true.
Move the days to match your rota. The labels below are Monday to Friday because they have to say something, but nothing here is attached to a weekday. What matters is the shape: one protected long session on your best day off, one harder effort midweek, the rest easy and short around whatever your schedule actually looks like. If your days off are Tuesday and Wednesday, slide the whole thing over. If you work Saturdays, your Saturday is whichever day you don't.
About five and a half hours across a full five-day clinical week, and nearly half of it sits in one protected Saturday. Nothing on a workday runs longer than forty minutes. That is the entire trick — the weekdays exist to keep you in the habit, and Saturday does the actual building.
The weekend you're on: move the long run to whichever day you're off that week, and shorten it without guilt. If there is no day off that week, drop to the triage order below and treat it as a maintenance week. One of those a month costs you nothing.
It will fall apart — a colleague calls out, a surgery runs long, you get four hours of sleep. Don't improvise in that moment. Cut in this order and stop thinking about it.
Cut intensity before volume. Turn the hard session into an easy one of the same length. Fitness lives in the accumulated easy minutes; the hard day can wait a week without costing you anything.
Shorten the long run, don't skip it. Ninety minutes instead of four hours still keeps the habit and most of the adaptation. A skipped long run costs far more than a small one.
Drop the easy days entirely. Yes, all of them. Nothing is lost in one week that isn't recovered in the next.
Take the whole week off and do not renegotiate it on Wednesday. A deliberate zero week is training. A guilty half-week of bad sessions is just fatigue with extra steps.
A full program for clinicians — training that flexes around a schedule you don't own, nutrition timed to shifts instead of to a lab, and a group of people doing the same thing between appointments.
Including plans built for you specifically. The week above is a shape, and a shape only gets you so far. If you're working six on and two off, coming back from a long time away, chasing a first half marathon or a hundred-miler, or training around an injury you've been ignoring since spring — that needs a plan written around your rota and your goal, not a template you translate. That's the part I do one to one.
It opens to the waitlist first, and the waitlist is small on purpose.
Get on the waitlist →A note on scope: I'm a veterinarian and a certified ultrarunning and endurance nutrition coach, which means I'm qualified to talk about training and fueling — not to diagnose you. If something hurts in a way that doesn't resolve, or you're starting from a long layoff or a medical condition, see a physician first. You already know this. I'm saying it anyway.