By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning I recently hosted our annual Memorial Day Ultrarunning Training camp in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The annual camp is a treat for me as I get to open up my house and share my hometown trails with eager athletes of all abilities and experience levels. Runs start and …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning One of the more audacious coaching goals I made for myself this year was to have less than a third of my athletes miss a training day due to injury. I knew this was a lofty goal as, depending on what research you read, up to 80% …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning As a coach, I’ve been trained and educated on how to improve athletes. I have spent innumerable hours delving into research, building networks of experts to lean on, attending conferences, and being challenged by my colleagues – all with the end goal of guiding athletes to …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning For the February 2019 edition of Ultrarunning Magazine, I wrote an article outlining the training of the Ultrarunners of the Year, Courtney Dauwalter and Jim Walmsley. What you may not realize, is that the article was actually due December 10th, well before the year was over …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning, Author of “Training Essentials for Ultrarunning” When I give training talks, I can inevitably count on being asked, “How long should my longest run be?” When I get this question, I usually retort with, “Why do you need a long run?” Silence ensues. The silence stems from …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning When I first started coaching ultrarunners in the early 2000’s, one of the things that I lamented most was the lack of specific research on the sport. Other endurance sports I worked with (marathon running, cycling and triathlon) could base their best practices on decades of …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning One of the entertaining, and educational, parts of my job is filtering through all of the latest and greatest gadgets athletes can use to track or improve performance. In the pre-Kickstarter days, this would mean unsolicited packages arriving at the office for us to unpack, test out …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning In Training Essentials for Ultrarunning, I wrote that elite ultramarathon athletes have three things in common. First off, they are tough. Nobody wins a race that lasts several hours or days solely with sheer luck, fitness or genetic talent (although the latter is one component that all …
By Jason Koop, Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning Sleep matters for a lot of reasons, and may even matter as much some of your training! For starters, the physiological repair and growth that actually makes you better happens when you rest, but predominantly when you sleep. It improves motor learning (learning a new skill) and …
By Andy Jones-Wilkins, CTS Ultrarunning Coach In one of my all-time favorite sports films, “A League of Their Own,” Tom Hanks plays Jimmy, a battle-tested baseball manager charged with the task of coaching a team in the women’s major leagues during World War II. Opposite Jimmy is Dottie, played with tortured passion by Geena Davis, …