How Long Should Your Longest Run be Before an Ultra? (Ep #2)

Most ultrarunners obsess over how long their longest run should be, but it might be the wrong question entirely. Coach Cliff Pittman breaks down how CTS Coaches actually determine long run length, and why one big run matters far less than most runners think.

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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

The Longest Run Obsession

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Most ultra runners obsess over the longest run. How long should my longest run be before my race? But that question is usually the wrong place to start. In this video, I'm going to explain why the longest long run is often misunderstood, why it matters far less than most runners believe, and how CTS coaches actually determine the right long run length for an ultra marathon. Let's walk through the way that 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 to think about your longest long run when preparing for an ultra marathon. When an athlete asks me how long should my longest run be, I usually respond with another question. Why do you need a long run? And most of the time there's a pause. Because runners rarely think about why their long run needs to be long. Instead, they assume a few things. That there's a magic distance, that a certain run is required before race day, or that one really big run builds a type of fitness you can't get any other way. But physiology doesn't work that way. There is no magic long run distance that qualifies you to be ready for an ultramarathon. I've coached athletes whose longest run was only 20% of their race distance, and I've coached athletes whose longest run was closer to 80%. Both approaches can work depending on the athlete and the context of their training. Because the truth is, one run is a tiny fraction of the work you do in training. Let's look at the numbers. Imagine you're preparing for 100 kilometers. You train for four months, averaging about 10 hours per week. That's about 160 hours of total training. Now imagine you do a seven-hour long run. That sounds huge, but mathematically that run represents just over 4% of your total training. And if your normal long run was already three hours, then the difference between that and a seven-hour run is only two and a half percent of your total volume. It's a very small piece of the overall puzzle. And in reality, the extra fatigue from a very long run often reduces training in the following week. So the overall impact becomes even smaller. Which is why, from a physiological standpoint, the difference between a five-hour long run and a seven-hour long run is often much smaller than athletes think. Durability is built across hundreds of hours of consistent training, not one heroic Saturday. So if the longest run isn't the key factor, how do we decide how long it should be? The way I coach this is to think about training like building a bridge. On one side is your current fitness, your durability, your ability to handle long runs, and on the other side is race day, the terrain, the duration, the logistical challenges. Your job during training is to build a bridge between those two points. But that bridge has to be built from both sides, where you are now and where you need to go. And in most cases, the near side of that bridge, your current durability is the most important part. As CTS, we start with something I call the reasonability test. The simple means asking a basic question. What length of a long run is reasonable for this athlete to handle right now? Instead of jumping to an arbitrary target, we progress the long run gradually. Early in the training cycle, increases might be around 20%, and then ten percent, and then five percent, and eventually two or three percent. Every few weeks we hold the distance steady to allow recovery. The goal is not precision, it's guidance. We're not trying to schedule a six hour and fifty-nine minute run. We're simply creating a guardrail for what is reasonable for that athlete. Because when long runs grow too aggressively, injury risk and recovery costs start to rise. And that compromises the rest of the training. So once we understand what's reasonable, we look at the other side of the bridge. Purpose. Because long runs should serve a purpose beyond physiology. There are three reasons I use particularly long runs in training. First, to practice nutrition. Second, to build confidence, and third to rehearse logistical challenges. Let's walk through those. Nutrition practice is one of the biggest for most ultrasunners. You need at least four hours for really stress your fueling strategy. That's usually when appetite changes, when sweet food stops sounding good, and when you start learning what actually works late in the run. The second reason is confidence. Sometimes an athlete simply needs to experience a longer effort to believe they can complete the race. The psychological component can be huge, but it doesn't require simulating the entire event either. It just needs to move the needle forward. The third reason is logistics. Maybe your race starts in cold weather and finishes in the heat. Maybe it's run through the night, or includes large elevation changes. Long runs can be useful for practicing gear systems, pacing strategies, or running through those conditions. So instead of asking how long should my longest run be, I ask athletes three questions. How long do you need to run to practice nutrition? How long do you need to run to build confidence? And how long do you need to run to rehearse race logistics? Then we compare those answers for what is reasonable for that athlete to handle. Where those two things overlap is usually where the longest run should land. Here's the big idea. The longest run is not a physiological requirement, it's a strategic decision. And the goal is not to find the biggest run you can survive, it's to find the smallest run that meaningfully moves your training forward without compromising the weeks around it. As CTS, we say this often major in the basics, minor in the marginal gains. And when it comes to ultra marathon training, durability wins late. If this helps you think differently about your long runs, subscribe to the CTS YouTube channel for more coach driven ultra running education.