Race High When You Live Low

Racing at altitude can feel intimidating, especially if you live at sea level.

Should you buy an altitude tent? Sleep in a hypoxic chamber? Wear an altitude mask?

In this episode, CTS Director of Coaching Cliff Pittman explains what actually improves altitude performance, how to time your arrival before race day, where heat training fits, and why your biggest advantage is still the fitness you build before you travel.

Whether you're preparing for Leadville, Pikes Peak, or any race at elevation, this video will help you focus on the strategies that matter and avoid wasting time and money on the ones that don't.

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

Altitude Race Panic Reset

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you have a race at altitude but live at sea level? Don't panic. Every year I get some version of the same message. An athlete signed up for Leadville or Pikes Peak or a race that goes above 12,000 feet and they live at 500 feet above sea level. The panic sets in, should I buy an altitude tent? Do I need a mask? Do I need to move to Colorado for a month? But here's the truth. Most of what people spend money and anxiety on doesn't really move the needle. And the stuff that actually works, simpler and cheaper than most want you to believe. 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. Today I'm walking you through how to actually prepare for a race at altitude when you can't live there. What matters, when to show up, how heat training could fit in, and what you can skip entirely. So let's start with the most important point in this entire video because if you only remember one thing, remember this.

Fitness Buffer Beats Any Hack

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Fitness is still your best tool. Altitude adds a new physiological cost on top of whatever you show up with. The bigger your fitness buffer, the more of that cost you can absorb and still perform. Now, if you're well prepared, you arrive at altitude with a bigger buffer to draw from. If your fitness has holes in it, altitude finds them fast and makes them worse. Physiologically, here's what's happening. As you go up, barometric pressure drops. That means fewer oxygen molecules available per breath, even though the percentage of oxygen in the air stays the same at roughly 21%. Your body responds by breathing faster and deeper, which helps some. It also means less oxygen is available to bind to hemoglobin and get delivered to working muscles. At a fixed pace, your heart rate climbs higher for the same output because your cardiovascular system is compensating for reduced oxygen delivery. That means your ceiling drops. VO2max at 10,000 feet is meaningfully lower than VO2 max at sea level, even an elite, acclimatized athletes. So the athlete who shows up with the highest sea level fitness, the best trained aerobic system, the most durable legs, is the athlete with the most room to lose and still perform well. This is why I tell athletes preparing for an altitude race: don't let altitude anxiety derail your entire training block. Keep building fitness right up until it's time to travel. A well-executed build with zero altitude specific intervention will outperform a mediocre build with every gadget in the toolbox.

When To Arrive For Acclimation

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Second, plan your calendar in advance and think carefully about when you arrive. This is where the research gets really messy, and I don't and I just want to be really honest about it. Governing bodies and researchers don't agree on a single acclimatization protocol, and recommended timelines in the literature range from a few days to three weeks, depending on who you ask. But there are some evidence informed principles that hold up. General Ascent guidelines suggest that once you're sleeping above roughly 9,000 feet, you shouldn't gain more than about 1,600 feet of sleeping elevation per day. And you should add an extra acclimatization day for every 1,000 meters or 32, 3,300 feet, you gain above that. Staging for several days in the 5,000 to 8,000 foot range before pushing higher also shows up consistently in the acclimatization literature. Translate that into race planning, and here's roughly what it looks like for two very different races. Leadville sits above 10,000 feet at the start, and the course climbs to 12,500 feet. That's serious altitude, and the research on rapid ascent to similar elevations point toward two reasonable strategies. Either get there as close to race day as you can, inside 24, maybe 36 hours, so you race before the worst of the early impairment sets in. Or commit to arriving 10 to 14 days out, ideally longer, so you're through the roughest window and picking up real acclimatization. What you want to avoid is landing three to four days out. That's often the worst window physiologically. Symptoms and performance decrements tend to peak right there, and you haven't been there long enough to adapt. Now Pike's peak is a little bit different. The race starts around 6,000 feet in Manitou Springs, which is a meaningfully smaller initial hit than Ledville's 10,000 foot start. And even though the course eventually tops out above 14,000 feet, because the starting elevation is lower, a shorter window, somewhere around 7 to 10 days, can meaningfully soften the initial physiological hit. Nothing changes the fact that you'll be breathing seriously thin air near the summit, no matter what you do, but the lower base elevation gives you more margin. Now those numbers are guidelines, not laws. Individual response to altitude varies a lot. And the honest research summary is that we don't have a perfect formula. But the framework holds. Know your race's elevation profile, know roughly where it lands on that continuum, and plan your travel around it instead of guessing.

The Value Of An Altitude Camp

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Now here's the piece most athletes skip entirely, and it might matter more than the arrival timing question. If your schedule allows it, get to altitude five to eight weeks out for a dedicated camp. I'm not talking about a camp to acclimatize to altitude. A camp that short isn't long enough to change your blood. I'm talking about a camp to understand the demands altitude puts on you specifically, and to get a big race-specific training stimulus you can't replicate at sea level. You learn things at altitude that you cannot learn from training software or a spreadsheet. How your pacing needs to shift, how your slower your uphill effort has to be, or how your appetite and hydration behave very differently. How sleep feels differently the first few nights. Now that information is gold, and it's only available to you if you get to go up to altitude in advance, with enough runway left in your training block to actually adjust. Plus, it gives you a huge psychological boost of confidence, knowing that you can or what you can expect well in advance of race week. Now I've got a full video on how to build a DIY training camp that you can apply to altitude. The link here is on the screen. Go watch that next if this applies to you.

Heat Training That Actually Helps

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Let's talk about heat training because this is one of the few interventions I actually endorse. Heat acclimation and altitude acclimatization aren't the same adaptation, but they overlap more than people think. Heat training expands plasma volume, lowers resting heart rate, and reduces core temperature strain during exercise. Some of those same mechanisms, particularly plasma volume expansion and improved oxygen delivery to working muscles, show up in cross-adaptation research as beneficial when athletes are later tested in hypoxia. Where it doesn't overlap is the hematological side. Altitude's biggest long-term adaptation is an increase in red blood cell mass driven by an increase in EPO in response to low oxygen. Heat training doesn't reliably produce that. So heat training isn't a substitute for altitude exposure. It's a complementary stressure that shares some of the same physiological currency. Practically, that makes heat training the best fallback option when you can't arrive three or more weeks out to get real acclimatization. Post-exercise sauna sessions or hot water immersion several times a week in the weeks leading into your race is a low-cost, low-risk way to bank some of the same cardiovascular adaptations that help you tolerate altitude stress. It's not as good as time spent at elevation, but it's meaningfully better than doing nothing at all.

Masks And Tents Reality Check

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Fourth, let's clear up the two products that generate the most confusion and the most wasted money. Altitude masks and altitude tents. Now, despite the name, an elevation training mask does not simulate altitude. It restricts airflow, which increases your work of breathing and raises carbon dioxide levels in your blood. It's a different physiological stress entirely. It's not the reduced oxygen concentration that defines real altitude. It'll make a set of intervals feel brutally hard, but the research consistently shows no improvement in VO2 max or altitude tolerance from wearing one. You're paying for a harder workout that sacrifices its quality and therefore result, not an altitude adaptation. Now, altitude tints are a more legitimate technology, and I want to be fair about that. Normal baric hypoxic tints genuinely reduce the oxygen concentration you're breathing, which is the real mechanism behind altitude adaptation. The problem is the dose required to get hematological benefit is high. Something in the range of 12 or more hours a night for three to four consecutive weeks at a properly calibrated simulated elevation. Most home setups fall short of that dose either because people can't tolerate a full night at the required elevation or because life doesn't allow for a month of uninterrupted nightly use. And there's the cost versus reward problem. Entry-level systems run several thousand dollars, plus you're dealing with the practical reality of sleeping inside a plastic enclosure. Sleep quality frequently suffers, especially early on and at higher simulated elevations, which is a real cost for endurance athlete because sleep is one of your biggest recovery levers. And if you got a partner, that's a second person now sleeping next to a compressor or inside a tent structure with reduced oxygen concentration that they didn't sign up for. For the vast majority of ultrarunners, the math doesn't favor a home altitude tent. You get more out of protecting your sleep, nailing your recovery, and putting that time and money into a better, more consistent training. If you're a professional athlete with the coach managing your dose and a schedule built around it, that calculation might change. But you probably also have the means to just go to altitude early. Last point, and it's the one that actually determines your race day experience.

Pacing By Feel And Final Framework

SPEAKER_00 10:17

Once you're at the race, effort has to be governed by feel, not by pace. Your normal training paces do not apply at altitude, and trying to hold them will bury you early. Your rate of perceived exertion as your primary guide, and let your heart rate confirm what your effort already tells you, that a given pace costs more up there than it does at home. And accept this going in. If you live at sea level and you are at a physiological disadvantage compared to athletes who live and train at altitude. Now that's not a failure of your preparation, and it doesn't mean you can't race successfully up high. It's just physiology. The goal isn't to erase that gap entirely, it's to show up as fit as possible, arrive with a smart plan for timing, skip the gadgets that don't do anything, and race the effort you're actually capable of on that day. That's the entire framework. Fitness first, smart, evidenced informed travel timing, heat training as a legitimate fallback, and skip the mask, think hard before you buy a tent, and run by feel once you're up there. Major in the basics, minor in the marginal gains. If you want coaching that applies these principles to your specific race and your specific altitude profile, visit trainwrite.com to connect with a CTS coach and subscribe for more coach driven ultra running education.