Weekly alllocation of time per Lydiard, Hadd, Malmo. Your opinions.

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Whatever is going to allow you to get in the most volume while recovering as best you can for the next day's run.

Doubles are pretty much universal among top level runners and will generally allow you to get in more miles with less stress than singles will but there are always going to be individual exceptions though most people who think they're the exceptions probably aren't.

What really matters is consistency.

HRE wrote:

Whatever is going to allow you to get in the most volume while recovering as best you can for the next day's run.

Doubles are pretty much universal among top level runners and will generally allow you to get in more miles with less stress than singles will but there are always going to be individual exceptions though most people who think they're the exceptions probably aren't.

What really matters is consistency.

It was just recently that i got this idea that it doesn't matter as much how i get the miles in as long as i do and do it consistently. I double a lot now, sometimes even triples. Run way more than before and it feels way beter.

HRE, it seems like you know a lot about van Aaken's training (i read all those threads and saw you posting a lot).

There is one thing about his training which is not quite clear to me, that is, i saw a chart with daily amounts of running in kilo's, i believe it went up to 40K/day for the marathon. This implies that van Aaken wants you to approximately run the same distance every day.

So is there no "long run" (relatively seen) with van Aaken? Just consistency?

Van Aaken was a theorist. Maybe as much theorist as coach. I've tried to figure out exactly what it would have been like to have been coached by him. I don't have a complete picture but I finally got some practical benefit to studying German for three years in school.

Some of his runners, and all of the marathoners I've been able to find, did long runs, usually pretty standard things in the 2-3 hour range but always with an emphasis on staying easy. And the long runs were done pretty much weekly at least in the months of marathon prep.

But he seems to have been as concerned with overall volume as with the length of runs and he did not believe it was a good thing to put a lot of stress on your system so long runs were easy, the fast work was slower than in many other systems and recovery between reps was more complete. He was advocating walking breaks before Jeff Galloway was toilet trained but the break were to allow you to run fast but with less stress.

His son told me that the two of them used to run 10 km in an hour every night after work. But it wasn't a steady run of ten minute miles. They broke it into segments and walked between the segments. I don't know specifically how long or fast the segements were.

In one of his essays called "Training for the Future" or something like that he said that top athletes would do up to five runs a day totalling about 40 km. By breaking the 40k into five segments he thought you could run faster than by doing it in one session and with less stress.

But most of his real life athletes did not run the same distance each day. Liane Winter alternated runs of 20-30 km each day with pace variations in the 30. Steffney had longer and shorter days, variations in pace and effort and didn't look all that different from what many guys at his lever were doing.

In your situation I'm not surprised that you're able to do more miles while feeling easier now that you're running more times per day. At some level of mileage covering the whole distance in one pop becomes hard no matter how slow you do it. When I was doing 120-140 a week it was pretty manageable. But I had a very short stretch when I was doing 120 on singles. That was much harder than 140 with doubles.

It's not an either/or kind of thing. The long run is important, Chris Wardlaw says it's the most important part of your training. Maybe he's over rating it, but it's important. But that doesn't mean that doubling doesn't matter.

Another 2c worth. I too, believe that the weekly long run is most important. In fact emphasised just that to one of my athletes the other day when she was going to cut one back .. I said I would rather she cut back maybe a couple of her mid week runs if she is cut for time but ALWAYS run that long run.

Kim Stevenson wrote:

Another 2c worth. I too, believe that the weekly long run is most important. In fact emphasised just that to one of my athletes the other day when she was going to cut one back .. I said I would rather she cut back maybe a couple of her mid week runs if she is cut for time but ALWAYS run that long run.

Kim, it sounds like you place a lot of emphasis on the long run. Could you elaborate on this a bit more?

It seems that there are quite some believers of consistent high mileage without any long run. Check out this thread:http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=3128623&page=0

Also Ed Whitlock, who runs the same duration every day, albeit 2-3 hours...

And the infamous "hard-easy myth" by jack farrell.

Also Gebrselassie's training (for as far as it's representative), which tops out at 25km (only 13% of the weekly mileage)):

And accoring to this link (

) Tergat's "long" run was only 14 miles.

Analyzing elite's logs i see that plenty of them have some kind of long run, but overall the percentage of this long run of weekly mileage is far lower than it is in slower runners. For a 80-100 mpw runner this would work out to a "long run" of 12-15 miles, quite less than the 20 miles.

Okay, A couple of things here. One, I never look at the likes of what Tergat and Geb do in training , other than to "get a handle" on what they are doing for their own Goals and my own curiosity, not to get any tips for training my athletes.

The reason : The athletes I am dealing with are in general : People who have been bought up in very western situations, a totally different "culture", a heritage that is at low altitude, A knowledge that the next meal can be found at a supermarket and they have had the latest conveniences at their fingertips.

In other words we need to build in an Athlete from a totally different background, what works for those guys does not necessarily work for the rest of us.

Regarding the long run.

Coming from a background where a long run on a Sunday was the "norm" and also finding over the years that starting the week with a long run seems to set up the athlete well for the rest of the week. No way I ignore the rest of the week .. as Malmo noted in that other thread.

This thread is about Weekly allocation of time. 99% of athletes I deal with in a normal situation hold down jobs and maybe also have families. Juggling time around those priorities is an interesting exercise.

Sunday is a day that can be used to a maximum.. so a group of my athletes will run at least 2 hours. Whether that is in excess of 30km or not I don't really care. When you are running courses that we do that are mostly hills you are getting stronger... as time progresses you will run further/faster at the same 'effort'.

In the case I mentioned above : the athlete was getting cut for time during one week (family and work priorities). She thought she would do 3 runs of 90 mins instead of her 1 long run and 2 others at 75 - 80 mins.

I said if time was the problem then make sure you do the long run ( we have a marathon on the horizon) and then cut back the 2 weekly runs to an hour.

I have stated this before : One of the biggest aspects I learned from Arthur Lydiard about this game is Consistency of days, Consistency of weeks, consistency of months, consistency of years.

You just have to be flexible in how you put together those days/weeks etc.

Hope that helps.