The Everyday Ultra Newsletter

Ultra training tips to help you be a better endurance athlete, every day
by Joe Corcione

#ENDUREBETTER 🐺 

How to make progress the right way in your next ultra training block

Sometimes, the answer isn’t to train more. It’s to train for the right things.

You’re probably already thinking about what your big race goals are for 2026.

Maybe it’s running a new distance you haven’t before.

Or maybe you’re looking to get a PR at a distance you’ve done several times.

Or, you’re doing a race in a terrain that is way out of your comfort zone.

No matter what your goals are, the heart of the goal is likely this: you want to get better.

That’s why we train. We train to make progress and get better so we can become the person capable of hitting the goals we set for ourselves.

But here’s the thing: if you don’t really know what is holding you back the most, you don’t know what you need to work on the most. So, you have to identify the key area that is going to lead to 5x or 10x improvement in your next race.

So, to make sure you craft your next training plan in a way that helps you hit your goals, here are the steps to do so.

1. Identify your biggest area (or areas) of opportunity

There are four key pillars I believe are the building blocks of running an great ultramarathon:

1. Durability: how long your leg muscles can go before dying out

2. Aerobic fitness: what your raw speed is at a low intensity

3. Nutrition/Hydration: i.e. how many carbs, fluids, and electrolytes you’re taking in per hour

4. Mindset: how well you can handle the adversity, struggles, and obstacles in an ultra

Chances are at least one of these things is the biggest thing that you’ll need to work on going into your next goal. It could be one thing. It could be all of them. But identifying what you are going to prioritize most is going to be the key focus.

This is super important. Because if you don’t identify what to work on the most, you may be missing the key thing that will actually help you get the goal.

For example, when I raced Javelina Jundred 100M for the first time, and wanted to go back next year, I thought that I needed to get faster (i.e. work on aerobic fitness) to get a better time. When in reality, I needed durability.

Because I optimized for the wrong thing, I ran a very similar time to the year before.

But, when I went back for year 3 and optimized for durability, I ran my fastest time at that race (even in hotter conditions). All because I optimized for the right things.

Here’s a simple way to tell what you need to optimize for:

If your legs hold you back the most (i.e. soreness, muscle fatigue), then you are likely durability limited. Pro tip: if you are racing a distance for the first time, you are likely durability limited by default since you’ve never ran that far.

If you feel like your breathing is holding you back the most, then you are likely aerobic fitness (or speed) limited.

If you get massive GI issues or dehydration has held you back the most, your biggest area of opportunity is dialing in nutrition/hydration

And if you feel like your mind quits before your body does, then you need to optimize for your mindset.

Reflect on your last races, and see what you need to optimize the most.

2. Add the training stimulus that will help you improve your area(s) of opportunity

Most of the time, when we hear about how to train for an ultramarathon, they say that we have to run a ton of easy miles and focus on increasing volume.

While this is great advice for someone who needs to work on durability, it may not be the best advice for someone who is really durable, but just needs to get faster.

So, based on what your biggest areas of opportunity are, you need to make sure you are adding the right training stimulus in to make the most progress in those areas.

Here are the key training stimuli to add for each of the areas of opportunity:

1. Durability: to get more durability, it’s really a matter of increasing overall volume at a low intensity and/or focusing on longer long runs. Plain and simple: the more weekly volume you can do (without sacrificing recovery), the more durable your legs are going to get. So, if you are durability limited, see if you can maximize the amount of easy volume you can do, ramped up in a safe manner, in your training. Or, you can shoot for the same weekly volume, and just have longer long runs. Both help build durability

2. Aerobic fitness: this one is a bit tricky because you have to identify why you’re not making enough progress in speed. For most ultrarunners, it is not including speed work into their routine. Speed work allows you to not only build overall speed, but to also increase your ceiling for fitness. Meaning, your upper limits to how fast you can get through doing easy volume raise up. So, make sure to incorporate speed work into your plan (1-2x per week depending on your experience level) to help to expand your aerobic capacity and get faster. If you are doing speed work and not getting the gains, you may be running your easy runs too hard. Which in that case, the solution is simple: run your easy runs easier. If you don’t run your easy runs easy, then you never become aerobically efficient.

3. Nutrition and hydration: your focus here is to keep testing out your nutrition and hydration strategy in your long runs to find the solution that will keep you well fueled, avoid stomach issues, and running strong. Here is a simple guide that you can follow to help:

   1. Shoot for 50-100g of carbs per hour on your long runs. Start on the low end if you aren’t fueling this much. Increase gradually each week if it feels like you can handle more. Find the sweet spot between maximum fuel and not feeling nauseous.

   2. Eat more frequently on long runs, about every 15-30 mins. The more frequent you eat, the more your digestive system gets used to constant fueling and won’t shut off on you.

   3. Find the gels/food that works for you. Try one new food item each week (don’t do more than one to try new because you want to see the effect of that food). This helps if the ingredients in the prior food items you’ve been taking have messed you up.

   4. Dial in hydration through a sweat test and sweat sodium test. This will help you find out how much fluid and sodium you need to take in. Probably one of the most important tests you can run.

   5. I suggest doing longer runs in your training to dial in your nutrition and hydration plan if you’re able to safely do so and if its within reason. The longer the run to test, the more likely it’ll work on race day.

4. Mindset: you have to start with identifying what is the biggest thing that is holding you back from a mindset perspective. Is it not wanting to feel the pain? Is it negative self-talk? Is it fear? Whatever the mindset barrier is, you have to create training sessions that will help you overcome those things. If you don’t want to run when you know you can because its uncomfortable, try to make a long run where you don’t walk and run the whole thing. If you’re dealing with negative self-talk, try switching the narrative and adding in positive mantras to your long runs; say them out loud to help you get through. Most importantly, develop a deep “why” and reason why you are out there. The more powerful your “why”, the more you’re going to willingly go through hell to get it.

3. Understand the initial difficulty

Once you know what to focus on, deploy it in your training. But here’s the thing: it will be tough.

If you’re training durability, there may be runs where your legs die out.

You may have a bad speed workout.

You may get gut issues as you test new strategies.

And all of this is okay.

The first thing to remember is that by training, we are trying to push the body beyond it’s current limits so it can adapt and get stronger.

So, if your legs get cooked on a durability focused run, that’s okay. We are putting the miles on it to get stronger.

If your stomach is feeling funky the first time you are trying 80g of carbs an hour, that is okay; your stomach is adapting to handling the load.

I always tell my athletes this: if every run felt great and you are making progress in every run, then the training plan actually isn’t working. Because you do need to push yourself to make progress.

Now, of course, you don’t want to make it too hard. If you’re risking injury or if you’re not making any progress on the long term, something will have to change.

But the point is this: these things take time to get better at. And at first, it will be tough. But your body and mind will adapt. You will get stronger. You will get better. And you will make progress.

So, trust the process. Adapt where necessary. And stay consistent.

You do that? You’ll be celebrating the wins when they come through on training and when you celebrate on race day.

Know these things change over your ultra career

The coolest thing about ultras is that our training needs continuously evolve race after race.

Some races, you may be going into it more durability limited. And some other races, you may be more aerobic fitness limited.

And so know that your biggest weaknesses won’t always be your biggest weaknesses. And the same goes with your strengths.

So, after every race, and when you’re setting goals, asking yourself where your biggest limiters are will help you to work on the areas you need to improve on the most. That way, you shape your training block up to be the best one yet.

What I’m loving in my current training

Reflection on the past season

It’s super easy to keep thinking about “what’s next”. In fact, I do think is really healthy to look ahead towards the goal on the horizon.

But if you’re always looking ahead, you can rob yourself of the gifts and lessons that your past accomplishments hold over the past year.

That’s why in my offseason, I am reflecting diligently on my 2025 race season. Including the things that went right, the things that went wrong, and the most memorable moments on the race course.

Here’s why that’s so important:

1. Thinking about all of the things that went right does two things: it allows you to reinforce all of the positive decisions you made in training and racing, so you can keep doing those things in the future. Also, it allows you to combat negative self-talk better. Often times, we let that voice tell us what we are doing wrong too often. So, reminding us that we ARE doing things right helps us to show that there are great things going on. And that gives us more self-confidence.

2. Thinking about all of the things that went wrong sets you up for the best race season yet. Why? Because those failures are data rich information that tells you “don’t do this again because it won’t get you what you want”. If you know what not to do, you get closer to find out what TO do. And that’ll get you closer to your goal. The key here is to not beat yourself up; instead, get stoked about the new information you’re learning to help you crush the next year.

3. Lastly, thinking about the memorable memories allow you to just celebrate the rad times you had out on the trail. Maybe you had an amazing run in a new place. Maybe you shared miles with a new friend in the middle of a race. Maybe you overcame a mental low that gives you so much strength. Reflect on those memories to celebrate what an awesome life you had.

A pro tip to make this process better is to track EVERYTHING in your training and racing in an easy to review place. My favorite place to do this is TrainingPeaks. You can not only track all of your runs and races to easily review them; but, you can also add notes in each workout easily so that you can add context and detail to make sure that no detail is missed. (P.S. You can sign up for a free account here)

Takeaway for you: don’t just rush into the next training block. Celebrate the wins. Learn from the losses. And savor the good memories. You do that, and not only will you have an even better upcoming training block. But you’ll see the prior one as your best one yet (until you complete the upcoming one, of course 😉 )

Probably the best episode we’ve ever released

Everyday Ultra Coach, Kilian Korth, just set the record for the fastest time to complete the Triple Crown of 200’s (Moab 240, Bigfoot 200, and Tahoe 200 in 5 months). And he won every race in that series along the way too.

To celebrate the accomplishment, we did a 4 hour long podcast (yes, you read that right), where we dove deep into Kilian’s training, diet, mindset, and race stories to share his biggest insights that helped him pull off this incredible accomplishment.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Kilian went to DNF’ing several races and being hospitalized, to winning all three races in the Triple Crown of 200’s

• The diet that he follows to help him optimize his performance (and how to tweak yours to improve your performance)

• How he approaches training and the biggest changes he’s made over the years

• Why a simple mindset shift he’s made can instantly make you a better runner

• How to be stronger than the negative voice in your mind to achieve any goal you want

• The key to being the best you can be at 200 mile ultras (and ultras in general)

• Who the biggest hunks in ultrarunning are, who we would choose to run with if we can choose anyone, and why Kilian hasn’t had a cookie since 2019.

Have questions about running, training, or anything else? Respond to this email and I’ll be happy to help.

Remember, strive to be a better ultrarunner, every day.

- Joe 🐺