CTS Ultrarunning

Call Directions Website Contact the business

World-class coaching for trail and ultrarunners.

10/28/2026

A strong ultramarathon performance isn’t just about how fast you can run. It’s about how well you execute your race strategy when fatigue starts changing the plan.

Your pacing, fueling, aid station decisions, and ability to adapt all matter.

Here are 5 decisions to make before your next ultra:

1️⃣ Define your race goal: Are you chasing a finish, a specific time, or the best possible ex*****on? Each requires a different approach to pacing, aid stations, and risk.

2️⃣ Build a plan that matches your psychology: Some athletes thrive with detailed splits. Others need flexible effort ranges or simple decision rules. Your plan should help you stay composed, not create more anxiety.

3️⃣ Study the course: Look beyond total elevation gain. Identify where the climbs occur, how technical the terrain is, the distance between aid stations, and the conditions you’re likely to encounter.

5️⃣ Plan for fatigue: Don’t assume your early-race pace will last all day. Pace by sustainable effort, anticipate slowing, and set carbohydrate, fluid, and sodium targets based on what you’ve practiced in training.

5️⃣ Create Plan A, B, and C: Decide in advance what you’ll do if you’re on target, falling behind, or experiencing a significant problem. Establish clear triggers for changing your approach and share them with your crew.

A great race strategy doesn’t guarantee a perfect day, but it gives you a framework for making better decisions when the day gets difficult.

🔖 Save this before your next race!

10/14/2026

The hardest training block of your year isn’t necessarily when you’ll perform your best. 🏃‍♂️

You can be building fitness while simultaneously accumulating enough fatigue to keep you from expressing it.

That’s the relationship between fitness and fatigue, and it’s one of the key foundations of endurance training.

For ultrarunners, this balance becomes particularly important because durability develops through repeated mechanical stress over months and years. You need enough loading to create adaptation, but you also need the recovery to absorb it.

Swipe through for the science behind stress, recovery, and adaptation and how to apply it to your own training.

09/30/2026

Every few months endurance athletes get handed a new shortcut.

A recovery method. A supplement. A training hack. A new physiological “problem” you didn’t know you had until someone showed up with the solution. They come with mechanisms, technical terminology, elite-athlete testimonials, charts, studies, and just enough physiology to make the whole thing feel credible.

So how do you actually separate a promising idea from pseudoscience? 👇

🔬 START WITH THE SOURCE: Who is making the claim? What expertise do they have? And do they have a financial reason for you to believe it?

📚 LOOK BEYOND ONE STUDY: A single paper or one coach’s experience isn’t scientific consensus. Evidence gets stronger when findings survive scrutiny and can be reproduced across researchers, athletes, and settings.

📊 KNOW THE EVIDENCE HIERARCHY: A systematic review doesn’t carry the same weight as an observational study. An observational study doesn’t carry the same weight as your training partner saying, “It worked for me.”

🧠 WATCH FOR LOGICAL SHORTCUTS: An athlete used something and then performed well. That doesn’t mean the thing caused the performance.

Evidence-based coaching doesn’t mean waiting for a peer-reviewed study before trying something new. Coaches and athletes have been ahead of the research before. What matters is the process: start with a plausible physiological mechanism, test it honestly, be clear about what’s still unknown, and be willing to change course when better evidence comes along.

That’s what evidence-based training actually looks like.

09/23/2026

You’ve probably heard the rule: never increase your weekly running mileage by more than 10%.

The problem isn’t necessarily the 10% number. It’s what we’ve been applying it to.

In a randomized trial of novice runners, one group progressed by about 10% per week while another progressed by nearly 24%. Injury rates? 20.8% vs. 20.3% - essentially identical.

More recently, researchers tracked 5,205 runners across 588,071 running sessions. Again, week-to-week percentage increases weren’t meaningfully associated with injury risk.

What did show up was the size of a single-session spike compared to the runner’s longest run in the previous 30 days.

🏃 Up to 10% beyond the recent longest run: reference range

🟡 >10–30%: elevated injury rate
🟠 >30–100%: further elevated injury rate
🔴 >100%: highest injury rate observed

That doesn’t mean 10.1% suddenly becomes dangerous. There isn’t a cliff at 10%. Risk increased as the size of the single-run spike increased.

So what do you actually do with that?

📏 For a single long run: use that ~10% mark as a useful guide when progressing beyond your longest run from the previous month.

📊 For weekly volume: don’t let a fixed percentage dictate your training. Your absolute mileage, training history, and how you’re responding to the load provide important context.

🦴 Coming back from injury? That’s a different problem entirely. Your cardiovascular fitness may be ready for more before the recovering bone, tendon, or other tissue is ready to handle it.

🚨 And symptoms still matter. Persistent pain or stiffness should carry more weight than whether your training log says your progression was mathematically “safe.”

Same 10% number. Completely different target.

09/16/2026

Your HRV dropped overnight. Should you change today’s workout?

Not necessarily.

HRV measures the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats, giving us a window into how your autonomic nervous system is responding to stress. A lot of athlete’s think:

🟢 High HRV = recovered
🔴 Low HRV = fatigued

But HRV doesn’t work quite that neatly.

For starters, your HRV only really makes sense compared to your own baseline. Values vary significantly from person to person, and different devices measure and present the data differently. Comparing your number to your training partner’s or an “ideal” HRV you found online doesn’t tell you much about how your body is responding.

It’s also completely normal to see HRV trend downward during a demanding training block. You’re intentionally adding stress and accumulating fatigue so your body can adapt to it. If HRV is moving down but you’re still hitting your workouts, feeling reasonably good, and performing normally, that lower number alone isn’t necessarily a reason to pull the plug.

Where things get more interesting is when several signals start moving together:

📉 HRV stays outside your normal range for multiple days
❤️ Resting heart rate starts trending upward
🏃 Normal training output begins to decline
😴 You consistently feel flat, heavy, or unusually fatigued

Now you have a much clearer picture that your body may not be absorbing the load well and a much better reason to consider adjusting training.

And here’s another wrinkle: higher HRV isn’t automatically better either. An unusually high reading can sometimes accompany physiological stress or show up around illness. Another reason chasing the biggest possible HRV number misses the point.

So instead of waking up and letting one number decide whether today is a green or red light, zoom out.

Establish your baseline. Watch what happens over a week or two. Compare the trend with your resting heart rate, training load, performance, and how you actually feel.

09/09/2026

Training for your first 50K can get complicated quickly. There are dozens of things you could optimize, but they don’t all have the same impact on your race. The biggest mistake is spending too much time refining the small things before you’ve built the foundation that makes them useful.

Start here ⬇️

Training availability and consistency: Your body needs months of repeatable training to adapt, which means the right training load is the one you can actually absorb. From there, gradually build volume and make that volume increasingly specific to your race. A flat, fast 50K and a technical mountain 50K may cover the same distance, but they require very different preparation. Your training should reflect the terrain, climbing, descending, duration, and conditions you’ll actually encounter.

Recovery and nutrition: Training stress only works when you can recover from it, and your capacity is influenced by everything happening outside of running: sleep, work, family, stress, and how much you’re eating. There’s no prize for following a bigger training plan if your life doesn’t give you the capacity to adapt to it.

Once those fundamentals are in place, things like periodization, strength training, tapering, heat preparation, gear, and macronutrient timing can make a good build even better.

The hierarchy is pretty simple: build what determines performance first, refine what can improve it second, and save the marginal gains for last.

09/02/2026

Think of your legs like a car. 🚗

On the climbs, they’re the drivetrain, producing force to move you forward.

On the descents? They become the brakes, absorbing force with every step.

That’s why a downhill can feel easy from a heart rate and breathing perspective while your quads are quietly taking a beating. That mechanical cost adds up! ⛰️

Coach Cliff Pittman breaks down the science of downhill durability and how to prepare your legs for race day in our newest YouTube video. Link in bio.

08/26/2026

Feeling sharp in training can be reassuring, especially as race day gets closer. But the fitness that produces a great interval session isn’t necessarily the fitness that carries you through 100 miles.

Ultrarunning asks you to sustain as much of your capacity as possible for hours on end. Building that ability requires a tremendous aerobic foundation, which is why volume becomes such an important part of race-specific training. ⛰️

There’s still a place for intensity throughout the year, but hanging onto more of it simply because it makes you feel fit can pull training away from what your race actually demands.

🔨 Volume is the biggest hammer we have for building the durability an ultra requires.

Full breakdown on the CTS YouTube channel. Link in bio. 📺

08/19/2026

Want to fuel like an elite ultrarunner? 🏃‍♀️

Don’t copy their numbers. Copy their process.

We sat down with Precision Fuel & Hydration Sports Scientist Emily Arrell to go behind the scenes of how elite fueling plans are actually built, tested, and adjusted when things don’t go according to plan.

The best part? You don’t have to be a pro to apply the same principles.

Watch the full conversation on our YouTube channel. 🔗 Link in bio.

Address

1319 W COLORADO Avenue
Colorado Springs, CO
80904

Telephone

+18663550645

Website

https://trainright.com/coaching/ultrarunning/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when CTS Ultrarunning posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.