Joining the SAS reserves with a full-time job
The training does not fit into a normal week; it replaces the parts of it you currently spend resting. Early mornings, weeknights and most of your weekends, for months, unsupervised. The people who manage it are the ones who moved training to a time nothing else can take.
Where the hours come from
Almost always the morning. I have written at length about waking at 4:30am, and the reason it works is not virtue — it is that nothing else is competing for that hour. Evening sessions get eaten by work running late roughly half the time.
What it costs the rest of your life
Weekends. Social plans. Some of your patience. Be straight with the people around you at the start rather than apologising every Saturday for six months; it is a far easier conversation in advance.
The week I ran
Easy runs early on weekdays, one session with some intensity, a long weekend day with load and navigation, and a second shorter session on tired legs the day after. Then a genuinely easy week roughly every fourth week, which is the part everyone skips and then gets injured.
The mental side of doing it alone
Nobody sees the training. There is no team, no coach, no crowd. That is the actual test, and it starts long before any assessment weekend.
A note on accuracy
Entry criteria, standards and selection dates are set by the Army and change over time. Take anything current from the Army's own UK Special Forces Reserve pages; take everything below as one applicant's experience.
Get my 21 SAS reserve selection prep guide
What the stages are, what I was training to before I applied, and how I'd build the twelve weeks before a selection weekend. Written from my own application, free, no pitch.