Hi Pammie.... It basically all the same as with a marathon. My feeling has always been that once you get the endurance to run 5 miles, you are not far from being able to run a marathon....once you've run a marathon, you've done all the work, the rest is mental. You've got to believe you can do it to be able to do ti. The mid will tell you to quit many times, but don't listen...only listen to pain (and even then I take some aspirin ) I believe that for our sport and at our level of running, training by time using a low HR method is the best. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the Low HR training group as several of us there are ultrarunners. During the Winter I am putting in maybe 10 hours a week of really slow running, then by Springtime I'll be up to 15 or more hours. It's all time on feet...hit the trails and plan on being out there 4-8 hours on the weekends. Do a lot of hiking in the mountains for leg strength. My basic plan is an hour a day every day and as much as I can do on the weekends while maintaining a life. 90% of my running is slow, very comfortable running. I race all the way up to 100 mile trails races in the Rocky Mountains at altitude and generally finish about midpack and in the top 5 in my age group (over 50). You will never regret trying an ultra....yes, it hurts but so do marathons and even 5K's in their own way. A good ultrarunning friend of mine many years ago said to me when I was where you were in trying to decide if this was the way for me to go "to run a marathon is like getting burned with a match, to run an ultra is more like getting slowly roasted over the coals." For the record, I don't like to hurt, so I train slowly and race comfortably....

I skipped over the marathon distance so I don't know about training for one of those, but my feeling is that it is slightly different in that you are trying to do a marathon as fast as you can. When you are doing a 50, 100 or 150 miler, it is less about speed and more about endurance unless you are an exceptional / world class runner. So I'm using what worked for me on my first 100 miler this past June (the Mohican 100) and using the Maffetone Method's low HR aerobic base building. Long sloooooow runs to build endurance and no worrying about tempo or speed runs: http://www.rrca.org/resources/articles/slowdown.html Enjoy!