How to Train for the CCC: A Coach's 20-Week Framework

The CCC sits in an odd place. It is the "little sister" of the UTMB, which makes people underestimate it, and it is a genuine mountain 100K with more climbing per kilometre than the big race, which makes people who underestimated it drop at Champex-Lac. This is the framework I use to prepare a runner for it, written for the mid-pack: someone targeting a finish somewhere between 20 and 27 hours, with one or two ultras already done.

Course details change slightly from year to year. The numbers here are the official 2026 edition; check the official CCC page for the current course and cutoffs before you plan around them.

What the CCC actually demands

• Distance and climb. 108 km and 6,200 m of elevation gain in 2026, with roughly as much descent as climb because Courmayeur (about 1,220 m) sits higher than Chamonix (about 1,035 m). That is 57 m of climbing per kilometre, which is more than the UTMB's 56 m and far more than most road-to-trail runners have ever sustained for a full day.
• The start. Friday at 09:00 in Courmayeur, and the first climb is the biggest single ascent of the race: about 1,400 m to Tête de la Tronche, at around 2,580 m, in the opening 10-12 km. It is done in a crowd of a couple of thousand people, on a path that bottlenecks. You cannot run it fast, and you should not try.
• The middle. After the Grand Col Ferret (about 2,540 m, the border into Switzerland), the course drops into the Swiss Val Ferret and becomes runnable for a long time: La Fouly, Champex-Lac, and the rolling valley sections in between. This is where people who only trained climbing lose an hour, because they have no rhythm on undulating trail after eight hours of effort.
• The end. Three more real climbs in the last 40 km - Bovine, Catogne, and the final ascent out of the valley floor toward La Flégère - each about 700-900 m, each arriving when your legs are already spent. The last descent into Chamonix is steep and comes at hour 20-plus for most.
• The night. With a 28-hour limit and a mid-pack finish around 22-25 hours, most of the field runs from dusk (about 20:30 in late August) until dawn and beyond. Night is not a section of this race. It is half of it.
• Cutoffs. Intermediate cutoffs are set generously at the start and tighten toward the end. The runners who miss them are rarely the slowest climbers; they are the ones who lost 90 minutes between checkpoints to stomach trouble, feet, or sitting down at Champex-Lac.

Who this framework is for

A prerequisite, honestly stated: you should have finished at least one mountain race of 50 km or more with over 2,500 m of gain before you build toward the CCC. Not because the distance is unmanageable otherwise, but because the entry requires Running Stones from qualifying races anyway, and because the failure modes at 100 km (gut, feet, night, mental) are ones you want to have met once at 50 km first. If you are choosing your first ultra, read choosing your first ultra distance before you commit to this one.

The framework below assumes a base of 45-60 km per week that you have held for at least two months, with some vertical in it. If you are coming from flat running, add an eight-week block of road-to-trail transition work in front of it.

The 20-week structure

Four blocks. Each is built in four-week cycles of three loading weeks and one recovery week; the recovery weeks are not optional, and the runners who skip them are the ones who arrive at the start line fit and injured.

The vertical numbers are for a runner finishing in 22-26 hours. If your target is under 18 hours, add roughly 20% to the vert; if you are aiming to beat the cutoff, the km and vert can be 15-20% lower, but the long-run durations should stay, because time on feet is what beats a cutoff.

Base: weeks 1-6

The job here is unglamorous: get the aerobic engine bigger and teach the legs to hike. Four to five runs a week, 80% of the time easy, one session of Zone 2 heart-rate work on climbs where you watch drift rather than pace, and one weekly strength session that starts building the eccentric load your quads will need in September.

The single most valuable session in this block is a 60-90 minute steep hike with poles at a pace you can hold a conversation at. It looks like nothing. It is the thing that gets you up Tête de la Tronche without spending your race in the first two hours.

Specific: weeks 7-14

Now the training starts to look like the race. Three things get added:

1. Long runs on race-like terrain, building from four hours to six, with a target of at least 1,500 m of gain in the longer ones. Not all in one climb: the CCC's middle is a series of 300-900 m ups and downs, so alternating terrain trains the right thing. If you do not live near mountains, the guide to converting flat training to mountain fitness covers treadmill, stairs, and repeats.
2. [Back-to-back long runs](/blog/back-to-back-long-runs) every second weekend from week 9: a 4-5 hour day followed by a 2-3 hour day. The second day is where you learn to run on tired quads, which is the whole second half of the CCC.
3. Dedicated downhill sessions once a week - 4-6 repeats of a 200-300 m technical descent, run with intent, on fresh legs early in the block and at the end of a long run later on. The downhill technique guide covers the mechanics; the point here is the adaptation. Your quads need to have been broken down and rebuilt by descending many times before race day, or the descent from Grand Col Ferret to La Fouly will do it for you, at kilometre 40, with 68 to go.

Keep one moderate-intensity session a week - hill repeats of 3-5 minutes or a tempo on rolling trail - because threshold work protects running economy while the volume climbs. Drop it in recovery weeks.

Peak: weeks 15-17

The rehearsal race goes in week 15 or 16: a 50-60 km mountain event with 2,500-3,500 m of gain, run at CCC effort, not raced. It is the only way to test your fueling, your kit, your poles, and your head at hour seven under real conditions. If a race does not fit, a supported solo day of 6-7 hours with full race kit is the fallback, but a race is better because you cannot quit a race quietly.

Two night sessions belong in this block - one of them the tail end of a long run into darkness, one a full 2-3 hour run starting at 21:00 or later. The night running guide covers headtorch choice and pacing; the training goal is to find out how your stomach, your eyes, and your mood behave after dark, before the CCC teaches you at 02:00 above Trient.

This is also when the weekly vert peaks at 3,000-4,000 m. It should feel like a lot. It should not feel like a crisis - if it does, you are a block ahead of where your body is, and you should hold the specific-block numbers instead.

Taper: weeks 18-20

A three-week taper: volume drops by about 30%, then 50%, then 70% into race week, while the intensity stays until ten days out. The last long run of 2.5-3 hours goes in week 18. Rehearse race-morning fueling twice. Pack the mandatory kit a week early and run once with the full pack so nothing rubs.

Fueling for 24 hours

A CCC finisher in the 22-26 hour range will burn somewhere north of 12,000 kcal. You cannot replace it; you can only slow the deficit. The target is 60-90 g of carbohydrate per hour from the first hour, trained in the long runs from week 7 so the gut adapts, with a deliberate drop toward the lower end in the hours after midnight when most stomachs get fussy.

Aid stations on the CCC are well stocked - broth, cheese, bread, fruit, and the usual sweet things - and the plan should use them rather than carrying everything, but the intake between stations is on you. Sodium and fluid matter in the valley sections, which are often hot in the afternoon; the high passes can be cold enough at night to make you stop drinking, which is its own problem.

Pacing a 28-hour cutoff

Effort, not pace, and the effort target for the first climb is embarrassingly easy: you should be able to speak in full sentences to the person in front of you all the way to Tête de la Tronche. Everyone who runs that climb hard is walking Bovine.

Practical structure for a 24-hour plan:

• Courmayeur to Grand Col Ferret (about 27 km, 6-7 h). Hike the climbs with poles, jog the flats, protect the quads on the descent to Refuge Bertone and the balcony traverse.
• Grand Col Ferret to Champex-Lac (about 28 km, 5-6 h). The runnable section. Fuel aggressively here while the stomach still cooperates, and run the flats and gentle downs rather than hiking them.
• Champex-Lac to Vallorcine (about 33 km, 7-8 h). Night. Bovine and Catogne arrive as a pair of 700-900 m climbs; expect them to take longer than the profile suggests and do not let the arithmetic frighten you.
• Vallorcine to Chamonix (about 20 km, 4-5 h). The last climb is a grind and the last descent hurts. Everyone slows here; the runners who "finish strong" simply slowed less.

The full logic of even-effort racing is in the trail ultra pacing guide. The CCC-specific version: bank nothing, and treat Champex-Lac as the halfway point of the effort even though it is past the halfway point of the distance.

The mistakes I see most

• Training the climbs and ignoring the descents. By far the most common. The CCC is decided on descending legs, and it takes months of specific loading to build them.
• Peaking too early. A big block in weeks 8-11, then fatigue, then a flat peak block. The plan above puts the largest weeks at 15-17 for a reason.
• No night practice. People who have never run past midnight discover, at midnight, that they hate it. That is a bad time to find out.
• Sitting down at Champex-Lac. The aid station is comfortable and the next section is long. Five minutes becomes twenty-five. Set a stop limit before you arrive.
• Chasing the km number. The runner who does 90 km of flat road a week is less prepared than the one doing 65 km with 3,500 m of climbing. Specificity beats volume for this race.

What a coach changes here

On paper the framework above is simple. In practice, the reason people hire a coach for the CCC is that twenty weeks is long enough for at least two things to go wrong - a niggle in week nine, a work trip that swallows the peak block, a rehearsal race that goes badly - and the value is in how the plan gets rewritten around them, not in the plan itself. If you want the framework applied to your calendar and your terrain, coaching is what I do; if you would rather self-coach, the race readiness score will at least tell you which of the five dimensions above is your weakest six weeks out.