By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a runner named Eluid Kipchoge ran under 2 hours for the marathon distance. Remember that? Yeah, that was less than 6 months ago. Rife with asterisks and caveats, the sub two-hour marathon was only the tip …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning I recently have noticed two types of ultrarunners emerge. The first is the ultrarunner who’s training is lacking something. Maybe it is the length of your long runs or maybe it’s the second hard interval session of the week. These ultrarunners are training in a fog at …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning During a recent conference call with our ultrarunning coaches, we were discussing some of the major changes we’ve made to our athlete’s training during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some athletes have been forced to alter their routes due to trail closures and others have had logistical constraints with …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning One of my coaching principles is to ‘coach the person first’. The main message of that philosophy is to treat athletes as people first. Their athletic endeavors, whether finishing their first 100-mile race or nabbing their next belt buckle, are all part of the equation but do …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning Life these past few weeks has been full of restrictions. Some of us can no longer leave our homes except for the essentials. Most cannot eat at a restaurant, congregate in groups of more than 10, find toilet paper in the store, go to the movies or …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning I have met two distinct types of athletes in my coaching career. Those who play the long game and those who do not. With athletes who play the long game, I usually have the opportunity to coach them for many years and many events. Athletes not playing …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the latest edition of the 128-kilometer Transgracanaria and support CTS Athletes Kaci Lickteig, Dylan Bowman and Gediminas Grinius. It has become a feature race on the ultramarathon scene and this year’s edition featured athletes from 56 different countries taking …
By Jason Koop with Jim Rutberg, Co-authors of “Training Essentials for Ultrarunning” This week I will be jet hopping across the eastern seaboard as well as over in Europe to record a few podcasts and support athletes racing at Transgrancanaria. With the ongoing COVID-19 (formerly known as the Coronavirus) outbreak, I did not take this …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning Let’s face it, training can often be boring. You do the same routes and there’s only so many ways you can (correctly) contrive workouts. You wake up, run, eat, go to work, rest, rinse, repeat. Most people have some vague pattern of run hard one day, run …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning This past weekend, I spent some time coaching and observing runners at the Black Canyons ultras. Over the last few years, I’ve found this to be a good litmus test of how runners are approaching training for the upcoming season. The race is early enough in the …