The Minimum Maximum Training Plan For Your First 100-Miler

How much training does it really take to finish a 100-mile ultramarathon?

In this episode, Cliff Pittman breaks down Jason Koop's Minimum-Maximum framework, explains why hours matter more than mileage, and shares a practical approach that helps everyday athletes prepare for their first ultra without living like a professional runner.

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 Big Ultra Training Myth

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Want to run your first hundred mileer? Stop obsessing over weekly mileage and focus on this instead. I'm Cliff Pittman, Pro Ultrarunning Coach and Director of Coaching at CTS. I coach athletes from first-time ultra runners to professional and world-class competitors. Let's talk about the assumption that stops most people from ever signing up for an ultra marathon. The assumption goes like this: if training for a marathon takes eight hours per week, then a 50 miler must take 16. And a 100-miler must take even more. Better clear the calendar, better warn the family, and hopefully you have a very understanding employer. Now that logic feels entirely reasonable, and it's also wrong. There is no linear relationship between marathon training volume and ultra-marathon training volume. A hundred miler does not require twice the training of a 50 miler, a 50 miler does not require twice the training of a marathon. The reality is that most athletes, people with jobs and families in real lives, train with the similar volume regardless of the distance they're targeting. What changes is not how much you train, it's how you structure what you have. And the volume threshold required to be successful is lower than almost every aspiring ultrarunner thinks.

The Minimum Maximum Framework

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So let's reframe the question entirely. The question isn't how many miles per week do I need. The question is can I hit the minimum volume threshold that gives my body what it actually needs to get to the finish line? Jason Koop, head ultrarunning coach at CTS and author of Training Essentials for Ultrarunning, developed a concept called the minimum maximum that answers this question directly. The minimum maximum is the minimum amount of training time that you need in order to have available during your week of highest training volume. Not your average across the whole training cycle, not your single best week. Alright, the floor for your key weeks, the weeks that matter the most. Here are the numbers. For a 50K or a 50 mile ultra marathon, six hours per week for at least three consecutive weeks, starting six weeks before your goal event. And for a 100K or a hundred mile ultra, nine hours per week for at least six consecutive weeks, starting nine weeks before your goal event. Now, outside of those key weeks, you can train at lower volume and still be perfectly successful. As long as your training is structured and intentional and you are prepared for the minimum volume threshold. The minimum maximum is not a guarantee of success, but not hitting it is a reliable predictor of underperformance or not finishing at all. This framework gives every aspiring ultrarunner an honest and practical question to answer. If I'm training for a 50K or 50 miler, can I commit to six hours per week for three weeks? Or for a 100K to 100 miler, can I commit to nine hours per week for six weeks? If yes, you have every reason to believe that you can do this. And if no, the distance just may not be right for you right now. And that's not failure, that's just information. Choose a different race, build towards that, and come back when the timing is

Why Hours Beat Miles

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right. Now let's talk about why hours matter more than miles. Most athletes track training by distance. Miles logged, weekly totals, peak mileage weeks, and on flat roads, that metric works reasonably well. But ultralunning doesn't always happen on flat roads. A 10-mile trail run in the mountains can take twice as long as a 10-mile road run and creates a fundamentally different stress on your body. The terrain, the elevation, the technical demands, all of it changes the equation. A mile does not always equal a mile, but an hour always equals an hour. This is why the minimum maximum is expressed in time and not distance. When you shift from tracking miles to tracking hours, the goal becomes clearer and the comparison becomes honest. You're not chasing a number on a GPS watch. You're accumulating time. You're accumulating aerobic fitness, durability, fat oxidation capacity that a hundred mile race actually demands of

How To Use Your Time Well

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you. So what do you do with the time that you have? Well, the minimum maximum sets the floor. What you do within that time determines everything above it. There's a few principles that apply regardless of how much time that you're working with. First, with limited time, every session needs a purpose. Okay, hard days are hard and easy days are easy. Second, your long run is non-negotiable. You must protect it above everything else. If something has to give in a busy week, it is not the long run. How long should your longest run be? I have a full video on that question. The link here is on the screen. Third, volume is still the primary driver of adaptation. Usually more is better, and as long as you can absorb it and recover from it, the minimum maximum is a floor, so not a ceiling. And if you can train more and recover from that, you probably should. Last, make your training look like your race as the event approaches. Time on feet on terrain that resembles the course. Practice fueling and hydration on long efforts, and running in conditions that simulate what race day will bring. Specificity in the final weeks matters a lot.

Specificity, Long Runs, And Next Steps

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Now that's the whole formula. It's that simple, repeatable, and very achievable. If you want to understand how to structure your easy running to maximize the return on every hour you invest, the easy running done right video covers that in full. And if you want to understand how to stack long efforts across consecutive days to build the durability that a 100 miler demands, the DIY training camp video is the place to start. Here's the simple message. You probably don't need as much time as you think. You just need enough. And enough may have a specific number. Six hours for three weeks for a 50K or 50 miler, nine hours for six weeks for a 100K or 100 miler. If you hit that floor, train with intention within it. Make your hard days hard and your easy days easy and your final weeks look like your race. The mileage obsession is keeping people from signing up for races that they are completely capable of finishing. So stop counting miles and start counting hours and make every one of them count. If you want coaching that builds a structured, individualized plan around the time that you actually have, visit trainwrite.com to connect with a CTS coach and subscribe for more coach driven ultra running education.