Articles by Jason Koop

How to Find Your "Why"

There is a strong correlation between purpose and success that I have been privy to witness throughout my coaching career. Those athletes motivated by an internal fire, rather than shiny belt buckles, are ironically more...

Transform Your Training

Many of you are likely deep in the throes of finding various ways to improve your ultramarathon performance. Certainly, the pages of this magazine (including the one you are currently on) are filled with all ma...

Match Adventure to Your Training

While summer is gone and the days are getting shorter, it’s never a bad time to think about your next ultra adventure run. After all, you are an endurance athlete. And I bet more than a few nickels tha...

How Much Should You Race?

This month’s issue is filled with racing opportunities galore. Stories of the triumphant elite and gritty, everyday athletes combined with majestic imagery of our outdoor playground makes for a potent elixir intoxicating...

How Young Is Too Young?

I ran my first marathon when I was 13. At the time, I thought it was somewhat of a novelty. I knew few people my age that would run such a feat. And like all teenagers, I succumbed to the scope of my own neighborhood...

Three Training Runs to Add to Your Routine

Sometimes just finding where to run can be a chore. The mental ping-pong game between doing something easy or designing an elaborate route can derail even the best intended ultrarunners. Over the course of my running...

Three Critical Workout Variables

As a coach, I have an unlimited number of ways I can manipulate workouts. The volume of time, number of miles, vertical gain, surface of the trail, workout frequency, training mode (running vs. cycling...

Three Principles of Creating a Long-Range Plan

When I look back at a year’s worth of training and racing for any athlete, inevitably, one common theme emerges. The athletes who reaped the most success during the year were also the athletes that planned out their t...

Karl Meltzer’s Training

One of the inherent problems of being a coach to both normal and elite athletes is that the former group always wants to copy the latter. Particularly in today’s world of Strava and publicly available training informa...

Anti-doping Solutions

Ultrarunning is at a crossroads. We continue to see growth in participation, race size and format, new players entering the space and more elite runners competing at the biggest races. This growth and development are pri...

How to Plan Your Return to Racing

If we’ve seen anything from the spring this year, it’s clear that races are returning. Runners are waiting and race directors are busy making all manners of virtual race briefings, socially distanced check-ins and con...

How to Eat for Increasing Miles

As summer heats up and the pandemic winds down, many ultrarunners are eager to put in some big miles of training in preparation for the backlog of events. We will stack up big training weekends, cajole our trainin...

Integrate Running into Everyday Life

Let’s face it, as everyday runners we love the prospect of living like an elite athlete. They have all day to train and endless amounts of time to explore the outdoors. With seemingly no responsibilities other than ru...

Psychobiological Model of Fatigue

Ultrarunners are motivated athletes. We meticulously track miles, time, intensity, amount of vertical gain, calories consumed on the run and a host of other variables that we find meaningful to performance. Most of th...

Winter Workouts

Let’s face it, the days are getting shorter and colder. Runners everywhere are digging out their headlamps from the far corners of their gear bins. We search for the rechargeable battery pack and then the...

Reconnect with Your Why

There’s an old adage that goes, “Adversity does not build character, it reveals it.” In this year of a global pandemic, raging wildfires and political and racial unrest, we are seeing this statement come to life in many...

Training for Unconventional Racing

As athletes are pivoting towards personal projects, virtual races, Fastest Known Times (FKTs) and (virtual) last person standing events, I’ve had to pivot what I do as a coach to help athletes meet these demands. In my h...

Tools to Track Your Training

When I first started coaching in 2001, I killed a lot of trees. Throughout the course of a workday, I received numerous faxes and e-mail attachments of training files from my athletes. I printed out every single one of t...

Training Without A Race

Let’s face it, most of us have zero clue what will happen on the racing front over the next several months. Some races are kicking their cans down the road, hoping for a celestial epiphany when the stars of physical dist...

History of the Barr Trail

Pop quiz: What do all of the following things have in common?The first woman to run a marathonA burro trail constructed in 1914“America the Beautiful”A $60 million tourist attractionOne of the most iconic trail marathons...