The Training Mistake Most Ultrarunners are Making (Ep #1)

Zone 2 training is the foundation of ultramarathon performance, but if it's all you're doing, it's also why you've stopped improving. Coach Cliff Pittman breaks down exactly how CTS Coaches strategically add intensity to raise your aerobic ceiling and make your easy running faster.

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HOST
Cliff Pittman is the Coaching Development Director at CTS, leading the Ultrarunning and Cycling Coaching staff with a specialty in guiding athletes from first-time ultrarunners to elite competitors at races like Western States 100, Leadville 100, and the Triple Crown of 200s. A competitive trail and ultra athlete himself, Cliff brings firsthand experience and a rare ability to turn complex training science into simple, actionable coaching.

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Transcript

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Most ultra runners train almost entirely in zone two, and that's exactly why many of them plateau. In this video, I'm going to explain why zone two is essential, why it isn't enough on its own, and how CTS coaches add intensity safely to raise your performance without increasing injury risk. Let's walk through the way I coach it. I'm Cliff Pittman, pro ultrarunning coach and director of coaching at CTS. I coach athletes from first-time ultrarunners to professional and world-class athletes. And today we're talking about how training intensity actually drives ultra-marathon performance. To understand zone two, we need to start with the science. An academic endurance physiology intensity is often described using a three-zone model easy, moderate, and hard. Now these three zones are anchored to two physiological markers, the first lactate threshold and the second lactate threshold. Most endurance training happens in the easy zone. Performance improvements come from including some hard training. And one of the biggest mistakes endurance athletes make is spending too much time in the moderate zone. Hard enough to create fatigue, but not hard enough to drive meaningful adaptation. But for coaching, three zones aren't precise enough. So we expand that model into a five-zone physiological system. Each zone creates different adaptations, avoiding any of them limits development. At CTS, we translate that physiology into shared coaching language. Zone one is recovery. Zone two is endurance, durable, efficient, and repeatable. Zone three builds steady state durability. Zone four raises lactate threshold, your highest sustainable aerobic effort. And zone five develops VO2 max, your overall capacity for work. Now all zones matter, but how they're organized matters even more. Let me give you a real coaching example. I coached a master's ultrarunner training six to eight hours per week. Very consistent, mostly zone two work, a long run every weekend, it was healthy and durable, but their pace hadn't improved in nearly two years before working together. Their easy pace was essentially stuck. Now we didn't add volume, instead, we added one structured intensity session per week, organized in blocks. One block focused on VO2 oriented intervals, another block focused on threshold work, each block had a clear physiological purpose. With eight weeks, their zone two pace improved by more than 30 seconds per mile at the same heart rate. Nothing about their easy running changed, except the ceiling above it. That's why intensity matters. Now here's the key question. If ultra marathons are run at easy to moderate intensity, why train harder than race effort? During an ultra, average intensity is roughly 60% of VO2 max. Now you'll have some harder moments like climbs and easier moments like hiking, or as we like to say, power hiking. But you almost never reach maximum aerobic capacity during the race itself. So why train there? Because of capacity. When VO2 max increases and lactate threshold rises, the work you can perform at lower intensities also increases. You don't train zone five to race at zone five. You train zone five to raise your aerobic ceiling. So the pace you can sustain in zone two becomes faster. As CTS, we organize intensity using a block hybrid periodization model. Each training block has one primary intensity focus. We don't mix zone three and zone four in the same block. We don't chase every adaptation at once. Most ultrarunners do best with just one to two hard sessions per week, depending on training age and history. But we typically space hard sessions by at least 48 hours, and we always return to zone one and zone two to absorb that work. Planning falls a simple progression. Early in the season, we build capacity with VO2 focus blocks and threshold blocks. And as race day approaches, we shift towards higher volume and race specific intensity. So capacity first, specificity second. Here's the bottom line. Zone two is essential. It builds durability, efficiency, and consistency. But zone two alone leads to plateau. Higher intensity training raises your ceiling. That's what makes your easy running faster. Zone two keeps you consistent, intensity keeps you improving. This helps you think differently about your training. Subscribe to the CTS YouTube channel for more coach driven ultra running education.