Great canova article

A Continental name proves very little sunshine

Renato - Thank you for taking the time to share your training philosophy on this silly message board.

I get the feeling that many athletes/coaches hope to get a training schedule to follow by reading your posts, but I think the ideas you explain here, especially in your last 2 posts, are much more valuable.

Renato Canova wrote:

At the end, coaching is not a science : is an art. And artists need to know science, but scientists don't need to know art.

WOW! What a great quote! This is something ALL coaches need to remember!

One of things I really appreciate about Canova is his interest in the HUMAN ELEMENT of coaching. (I think a lot people overlook his interest in his athletes as people.) Train hard, but recognize we're talking about people who respond to different stimuli, need different lengths of recovery, & have human problems. Athletes aren't robots.

But, everyone wants to know Canova's training plans & how they can apply it. As he said earlier, EXTENSION and INTENSITY...and recovery.

Thanks, Mr. Canova.

There are a number of fools on this mesasage board. Let us have a frank discussion where many of us can learn from the worlds greatest marathon coach. Too many fools with big egos thinking they can dismiss Renato's methodology. All they serve to do is spoil it for the rest of us willing subjects. Shame on the likes of Jim and others who I shall not name. If you do not like it go away and start up your own thread.

HRE/Renato - thank you both for your replies.

HRE - do you see a place for shorter, sharper efforts with full recoveries in building that aerobic house? Given Lydiard's use of both long and short fartleks, I would assume yes?

Renato - conversely, in addition to "a lot of anaerobic efforts, mixed of course with something typically aerobic", do you see a place for longer aerobic efforts similar to (but initially at a less intense level maybe?) your marathon specific training as part of building that aerobic house with extension of distance and intensity of pace being the aim over this period until you can handle a larger volume of these efforts at a suitable % of RP?

According to this article in a British newspaper, Haile Gebreselassie seems to have a mindset that is similar to a European or American athlete:

Quotes from Haile in the article:

"We had to stay in the Sheraton next to Heathrow but when we arrived it was about 11 o'clock in the evening and the middle of the winter. It was impossible to train outside."

"I started to think about how I could train and then I noticed that my hotel corridor was very long. I put on my shoes and started to run up and down it, and then some of my friends joined me."

"By that time it was close to midnight and people started to come out of their rooms to look at us. Do you know what happened? They all thought it was an emergency and started following us. One old woman was shouting and running down the corridor in her pyjamas."

"The reason I'm telling you this is that I didn't want to miss a day's training. I always tell young athletes the same thing, 'Wherever you go, whatever you do, what must your top priority be? Running."

"In my life I do a lot of things but I never forget my training. Athletics is in my blood. The top priority must always be training, training. This is a discipline. You have to do it."

Aerobic House wrote:

HRE/Renato - thank you both for your replies.

Agreed. I don't make it my effort to agree with what is written, but instead to learn. Thanks to both of you (and Cabral and others) for sharing your thoughts, agreements, differences.

HRE wrote:

I was planning on not posting on this thread anymore but because there are several people referring to my last post I'll hang on a bit more. This may get kind of lengthy.

Why you waste your time and energy with this same kind of your post introduction something you are recurrent ? Ther´s no need ! You don´t plan to post but there you do either.

Since years ago , if not one decade, that you post here and some of your posts opens with the same promise to stop and quite out post, that you don´t execute either.

Once in a while you want to pass this same idea. You wanted to give up to post, your unhappy with rubbish posts, colored discuss, but the fact is that until today you don´t give up to post.

If you want top post on LR.com or you don´t, it´s your choice, it´s t your freedom, it´s your individual decision.

The fact is that you introduce your posts with the kind of sentence panacea that is “I don´t wanted to post but…” or “this is my last post because I can´t stand colored posts” just makes lost of creditability. How might we trust in one individual that threat to give up to post, but continue to post either ?

It´s time that you realize that you and some others you did post compulsively about Lydiard, and that you can´t stand any kind of Lydiard criticism. After all we might read in the underlines that you still think Lydiard is “the perfect training”, some decades passed by, thousand of rich coaches, but for you the training methodology stops and is complete the day Lydiard died. Doesn´t exist nothing superior to Lydiard training, and always will not, and nothing else exists that is at the same levelr or superior to Lydiard training. I guess that you aren´t alone on this your way to think Lydiard as always the best training in any circumstance.

Actually, since the times goes by and the methodology debate goes deeply in LR.com despite some rubbish posts, I guess that is obvious that yours unquestionable Lydiardism dogmas, Lydiard “100mile volume” Lydiard “long run”, “unlimited aerobic progress by aerobic training”, “aerobic first”, “Lydiard the perfect training”, Lydiard “the maker of champions” ,everything else from Lydiard is not the kind of best rich perfect training that was supposed to be in the past decades. In some modern training and competitive contexts and XX! Century training needs and XXI methodology knowledge, Lydiard is not as good as some supposed, and it´s not negative for the Lydiard method that did exist other training options and other training alternatives, other training diversity, that might work more effective that Lydiard training.

In fact your problem is that you can´t stand the other idea that is different that your on idea.

You disagree with some, you tell your own training story, your private conversation with Lydiard the man, and after all, you can´t stand or hardly stand that the others do the same with you, that few do disagree with you. This is nothing but an anti democratic attitude that was been recurrent from some of the Lydiardism, not just you.

I'd need to know how short and sharp the efforts you're talking about are supposed to be and the answer would depend a lot on the particular athlete.

Lydiard would say that his athletes did their base running "as fast as they could without getting out of breath." he'd also say that you should work on your speed all year long even though he had a phase that was specifically devoted to do doing that and he'd suggested doing some "easy" hill reps during the base phase. Friends of mine who know Bill Baillie well have told me that Baillie did 220s pretty much throughout the year. Dick Quax did sessions like 20x440, maybe in something like 70-75, during his base phase but for him that sort of running did not violate Lydiard's idea of not getting out of breath. Barry Magee would do ten mile runs where he'd go "out" in 30 minutes and come "back" in 25-26.

In trying to get my oldest son ready for a good collegiate cross country season, Barry and I put together a summer base phase for him. But it wasn't just distance work. Once a week he'd do a 6-7 mile run over a very undulating stretch of highway at a good clip and then either a race at an all-comers meet or a tempo run of three miles. Later these sessions became hill reps and a session of 30 second reps at a fast pace with a full recovery, approximating a session of 220s. None of this would fit with the base phase you'd read about in any of Arthur's books and in past years his summers looked much more like the schedules in the books, though they weren't Xerox copies. We made the changes that we did this summer to address what we thought were some shortcomings in the things we'd done before. But we were careful to make sure that the overall focus was always on getting in good volume, e.g, that 6-7 mile hilly tempo run was always preceded and followed by a three mile "warm-up" and "cool-down," we had a run of about two hours in the mix and another run or two of 90 minutes.

So I'd answer your question with a very tentative yes. The reason the yes is tentative is that Arthur would worry that you'd get overly fixated on the short, sharp efforts, maybe start timing them and then pushing harder to get the times to come down, shorten some of your runs because you're tired from the short, sharp, efforts or sort of tapering to get faster times when you do them, etc. None of that, in his plan, was supposed to happen when you were base building and if you could not do short, sharp, efforts without compromising your distance work then he'd have been against it. But if you can add shorter and sharper runs while not overcooking yourself or losing the focus on base building then, yes.

You know, at one point, I was just going to say "yes" and nothing more.

Adam Smith,

Comment is very much appreciated.

“There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Please don´t try to say that basically we all do the same kind of training, or similar training because the training variable are always the same.

Often the diffrence is in the details. the same trainig principles might leads to very different training.

The attempt to be inclusive and sees in the other or 2 individuald the same training is ignorance.

Renato Canova training got some points of affinity and agreement with some other training methiods, namely the Lydiard one. However that are both 2 distant and diffrent training methods. The attempt to underestimate the difference is just training misunderstand.

“There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.”

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“After all Renato Canova training is not distant than Lydiard one, and vice versa”

“Baldini did Lydiard training”

“James Li is a Lydiard coach”

“Alberto Salazar is Lydiard

- From LetsRun.com posts

Please don´t try to say that basically we all do the same kind of training, or similar training because the training variables are always the same or just a few.

Often the difference is in the details. The same training principles might leads to very different training.

The attempt to be inclusive and in 2 individuals the same training is ignorance.

Renato Canova training got some points of affinity and agreement with some other training methods, namely the Lydiard one. However both Renato and Lydiard are 2 distant and different training methods. The attempt to underestimate the training differences is just training misunderstand.

We have two different engines : the bioenergetic, providing for giving energy and duration for every action we do, and the biomechanical, which works on the power of the action.

Every short action depends on the biomechanical engine : there are not energetic problems when we look at actions lasting 5" / 8" (under the energetic point of view, these kinds of efforts are callend "alactic"). For that reason, to work for increasing the "specific resistance" in a thrower, for example, is something not only useless, but also damageous. Different, instead, is to work for increasing the "general resistance", that we can find as base of every type of training.

For better understanding, I give some exmple, always referred to a thrower, that is the most distant type of athletes from a middle distance runner.

In his case, "specific resistance" means the ability to perform a higher number of throws at your max effort. In a competition there is a maximum of 6 throws, so the ability to throw 30 times around his best doesn't have any value for his results. It's very much more important to try to increase specific strength and technique, in order to be able to throw longer, one time only, during the competition.

So, in his training, a thrower, when look at a technical session, tries to fix some technical particular, executing many attempts close to the maximal intensity, but maintaining a margin for having the full focus on one particular. Therefore, it's clear that, if he's able to do 50 attempts instead 30, he can have a more productive training, and for being able to do this he must work for increasing his "general resistance".

How can we improve our general resistance ? Increasing the volume of the exercises we use, with the goal to give more resistance to every muscular district. This is "general resistance" for the biomechanical engine.

But, when we speak about some physical action lasting more long time, we need to build the "specific resistance", and this fact is connected, in different percentages depending on the duration of the effort, with both the Aerobic and Anaerobic System.

I give an example speaking about different types of 800m runners.

We can have athletes very strong aerobically. This category had, especially in the past, many champions, as Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Peter Snell and a lot of other specialists.

All these athletes started their career FROM an aerobic point of view. Britons had in the school cross competitions very long, and ran in their first championships, while juniores, longer distances (In European Junior Championships, Cram 3000m in 1979 and Coe 1500m in 1975, the Swiss Andre Bucher, WCh 2001, from Cross Country, etc.)

For all these kind of athletes, the goal is clear : THEY ARE AEROBIC ANIMALS, with a very high Aerobic Power, and for developing their events (they are athletes that can run longer distances, too) THEY NEED TO MAINTAIN WHAT THEY ALREADY HAVE, TRYING TO REDUCE THE GAP THEY HAVE ON THE BIOMECHANICAL POINT OF VIEW.

When we speak about the full career of these athletes, the idea of "Aerobic First" can be correct, also if they did a lot of activity in other directions (for example, playing football or rugby) for building the base of their biomechanical engine without a real specific goal.

But there are a lot of other runners starting the event in spite of very low aerobic qualities, able to reach good results in short time because their biomechanical engine is really very strong. This is the case of David Rudisha today, but in the past we had Rudolf Harbig, Tom Courtney, Mel Whitfield, Bill Crothers, Alberto Juantorena and many Kenyans, as for instead Billy Konchellah and Paul Ereng.

In this case, they had a very strong biomechanical engine and a morphology like long sprinters : tall between 1.85 and 1.90, with strong muscle masses and very high natural speed.

In this case, we have to continue in the direction of speed, trying to improve in the aerobic direction step by step, BUT NEVER WE CAN FORGET TO TRAIN THE MAIN QUALITIES THEY HAVE.

I give you two examples, with Kenyans, of the current days.

JOB KINYOR came to me for starting his training because his father, Barnabas Kinyor, 48"7 in 400 hs and 1'44"7 in 800m many years ago, introduced him to me (Barnabas is the husband of Selina Kosgei, my athlete winning Boston Marathon in 2009). Job was n. 3 in the National Championships for secondary school in 2006 in Decathlon. When he arrived in the camp, I saw very good attitudes of explosivity and coordination, but completely empty black board for every aerobic activity. After 5 months of training, he was not able running 5 km under 20' (and in LR everybody thinks Kenyans have years of Aerobic activity and are very strong under this point of view....).

In 2007, he ran 1'47" having a best in 5 km of 18'22".

In 2011, he ran 1'45"07 having a best of 15'07".

This year, he ran 1'43"74 at the beginning of the season, when was more ready aerobically.

But, along all these years, we NEVER forgot the training of speed, that was the main dish of his preparation, in every period of the year.

The second example is LEONARD KOSENCHA, the World Youth Champion of last year.

He won, in fron from the first meter like Rudisha in London, defeating Aman, Kitum and Amos, running 1'44"06, WITHOUT HAVING ANY TRACK SESSION TILL THE LAST PERIOD IN THE OFFICIAL CAMP. This because where he lived there was no track. So, I provided for a program where the most important training was RUNNING SHORT AND FAST, using some Fartlek with max extension 20', and a lot of different distances uphill, from short (60m at max speed) till "specific" (4 times 1'30", about 500m, at a gradient of 12%). In this case, I never gave him any info about recovery. Being so new and so young (last year it was his first year of activity), I told him "go for the next when you are ready, but try to push near your max possibility".

So, this was a training of "Lactic Capacity", and this is a quality we have to develop from the beginning of the career. Like in every situation, we need to know the "dosage" of these workouts : normally, I use with young athletes one session every two weeks, and other two sessions with 85% of intensity, shorter recovery and more volume.

This was also the way Brother Colm followed with David Rudisha. He started with the idea of 400m, and already was able running 1'45" before going in training for something longer than 30' very easy.

So, of course for these athletes "aerobic first" is a big mistake.

I explained several times that every person is different from another person, and that's the reason because general training tables and general principles can't exist in middle distances. This is also the reason because the classic periodisation, studied by methodologists of Soviet Union in the period of 60-70, NEVER produced good results in middle distance, without the support of doping.

The fact is that 5 throwers in the same event, also if having different percentages of the same qualities (one can be a little bit faster, another more explosive, another can have more mass, etc...), are very much more similar than 5 runners. When we speak about runners, top or not top, we have a very wide range of possibility for reaching the same result. In this case, the first step is to analyse their quality, and only after we have to create their "training cloth", different from the cloth of another athlete of the same level.

At the end, what coaches have to do is to try to understand the quality of an athlete. There is no training for one event in middle distances, but training for an athlete who can run also different events.

Use your brain, your passion, your feeling. Don't use tables prepared from somebody else. This is one of the reasons because for many it's very dufficult to understand my training phylosophy : because I post the reality, I cant post the feeling I have looking at one training session, that is the reason because some times I go to change the next workouts. Coaching is something connected with the daily life, not with a theoric program.

We are different but not in the way you mention. My knowledge comes from a myriad of miniature scientific experiments and yours from other peoples experiments. However well crafted your method is (and it is very well crafted), the foundations of your thinking are others people ideas. Most people operate like this and you obviously do it better than most, however, i want original thinking and this you cannot provide, even though it appears to most on here that you are an original thinker. Cerutty, Lydiard, Matveyev, Igloi are all originals. Thanks for the sociological reply, it is worthwhile but not what i was looking for. I was hoping for a technical reply, maybe delving into the factors determining length of recovery in your system. This would have been good for everyone and a step in the direction you need to take in order for posters and readers of this site to be able to actually apply your knowledge to themselves. At the moment this is not happening because people cannot understand concretely enough how to practically apply what you are saying. In part this is why i am questioning you. Nobody knows who i am and the only personal thing i have to gain is enjoying critically thinking about this sport. Anyway lets look at what you said.

48 hours is bullshit sometimes, but the most common recovery period is 48 hours. Not sure how you can deny that.

What make complicated what is simple; this site is 90% beginner and 9.5% moderate. We are talking about opening recovery yes? Opening recovery in any way (between reps, sets, sessions) acts to begin to peak an athlete, to allow for a future increase in intensity. However, it is more often than not that training intensity increases without a change in recovery, to account for overload. Is it not so?

Boy. Both are necessary. Do you only use one? When increasing capacity you don't open recovery. When increasing power and speed you progressively open recovery. One usually occurs before the other in any training process.

[/quote]All your considerations about what you need for building your "aerobic house" (I see now a lot of people use this words, that I used first in one congress some year ago for explaining what an athlete of middle distance has to do in his career) are connected with an obsolete idea of aerobic. When I came Kenya for the first time, I had many thing to teach, and a lot of thing to learn.[/quote]Confusing paragraph. The aerobic house is a good concept and i can see it is spreading nicely. Personally i like to divide the capacity and power aspects up in my mind but to consider them both together works nicely with the idea of an 'aerobic house'. What i don't understand is what you mean by "All your considerations about what you need for building your "aerobic house" are connected with an obsolete idea of aerobic." Could you explain?

I agree this is generally true. The native type will tend to stay closer to their ideal shape and be too bodily aware to allow themselves to fall too far out of this shape. The civilised westerner is not so bodily aware and so cannot use his physical feeling very clearly, so we tend to rely on ideas instead. Also we tend to think repetitive structure is better than spontaneous, evidence based decision making. This is of course a generalisation as the population groups do slightly cross over. There is always the natural whitey and the over-thinking native.

This is the typical mentality of professionals as well. Just look above at what Haile says about not missing a day. The difference between an amateur and a professional is mentality. The amateur lives a normal everyday lifestlye and the professional lives a athletes lifestyle. Every athlete changes from one to the other at some point do they not? The decision is made when the athlete decides their entire lifestyle is going to be based around being an athlete and not a normal everyday person anymore. The priority shifts from wherever it was in life to ensuring you optimise each and every training session. Eating habits, sleeping patterns, time spent actively recovering the body, limiting of social time, having a relationship with someone who is also on the same path, even seeking knowledge to further enhance anything that 'might' be related. These are all things we can do to enhance our ability to train, and so become factors an athlete will attend to once the decision to become an elite athlete is made.

I realise you were trying to say something different but this distinction was needed, to avoid confusion.

I understand and thanks for pointing that out as it is something in Westernised countries that is less of a problem, but every day? how often do emergencies really occur, so we have a real idea of the situation?

Ok challenge accepted. Simple answer is the change from 'little' to 'good'. Without knowing your precise definitions of these two words we can still make an obvious inference that good is superior to little, so this would be the simple answer to your question.

The more complex answer is that nothing is isolated in reality. Even though we divide up and isolate the different qualities of a human being in order to understand them and apply training methods to them, the reality is that the entire organism that is a human being is completely interconnected. So we could say that moving from little to good training means that volume of training increased directly leading to an increase in their aerobic capacity, so this could be the main reason. However, moving from little to good could also mean that training quality has increased, although this is a less obvious inference it is one we can make if the coach involved has some quality.

I generally covered my thoughts on this above but this last sentence is not entirely representative of the full picture. For example an elite athlete who operates right now at 98% of his lifetime capacity. Then take the 3 times a week part timer who decides to dedicate 1 year to full time training loads. The part timer catches up in capacity to the elite, however the ex part timer now full timer rapidly leaves behind he former part time running mates and this is what you are referring to i think.

I hear what you are saying generally but there are some points that simply aren't true. Matveyev was a scientist who turned coach and his approach in the sport of track and field was new. Gerschler was a scientist. As for Lydiard i don't believe he decided to explore new areas at all. I think he decided to explore himself and used his own perceptions to 'see' what was occurring in his body. In the process of this exploration at some point he decided he saw clearly what was really going on, in the human body. So he experimented with all of the different things he could now see and took them out to their limits, his limits. Then he tested all of this on other people to make sure of the validity, for something true for one and not another could easily be an error in perception. So it is not just something new that Lydiard found, he discovered what is really there, in the human body.

The thing is there are laws, rules, patterns and systems that do exist. On top of that we have all of the modifying variable that influence the underlying laws, so each individual case appears different. But the fact is underneath of all of the surface differences are the immutable natural laws, which are not selective or partial, they are totally impartial. We can escape them about as much as we can of the most well known one, gravity.

Coaching is a scientific art. Painting is more down the line of pure art and the physiologists are more to the scientific. But coaching is split down the middle nicely. Of course it takes some experience to be able to step outside the rigid boundaries of an early scientific knowledge base. Of course doing a Lydiard or a Cerutty, where science was not required in order to advance their own understanding, is not a very common path for a coach.

Peter Winter / gypsy / flow,

Please stop posting on let'srun.com

Regards,

Daryl

HRE & Renato - again, thank you both for your time and informative responses. All very much appreciated.

HRE - I was thinking along the lines of what you've basically mentioned actually; 30-60s reps @ a controlled effort with a full recovery, "easy" hill reps, and shorter tempos than the traditional Lydiard style base efforts (in line with the back part of the out and backs), but all as a small part of a larger volume run and certainly done to effort rather than pushing to achieve a quicker pace, etc.

Renato - "Use your brain, your passion, your feeling. Don't use tables prepared from somebody else.". I certainly agree; the last thing I am looking for is some general training principles or programs to follow blindly without any individual adjustments.

To make sure I have understood you correctly, are you essentially saying that the methodology to build your aerobic house is, much like how you would structure a specific phase, dependant on an individual's physiology, and that you should have the main focus on their primary qualities, with the aim to improve their lesser qualities at a slower pace to ensure you do not detract from their main qualities? Essentially, work to your strengths, but have a plan to strengthen your weaknesses?

The faster pace will come on its own as long as you don't wear yourself out by overdoing the things you mention or try to fporce that faster pace before its time. Barry suggests checking your pulse each morning when you wake up and if you have a stretch of more than three days when it's 10% or more above normal, you're overdoing things and need a few very easy days.

Support for the idea that "48 hours recovery" is not for every athlete or every workout from several different sources:

The first one is Frank Horwill, known for proposing really hard and maybe impossible workout schedules. Here he describes two athletes who needed more easy/rest days and succeeded:

Day 1 Aerobic – run half marathon distance fast

Day 2 Aerobic – 3 x 2 miles at 10km speed with 90 secs recovery

Day 3 Anaerobic – 8 x 400m at 1,500m speed with 60 secs rest

Day 4 Aerobic – 4 x 1 mile at 5km speed (target speed) with 60 secs rest

Day 5 Aerobic – 3 x 1,500m at 3km speed with 3 mins rest

Day 6 REST

Day 7 If no race: anaerobic – 8 x 200m at 800m speed with 60 secs rest

Day 8 Aerobic – run 10km very fast

Day 9 Aerobic – run half marathon fast

Day 10 Aerobic – 7 x 800m at 5km speed with 30 secs rest

Day 11 Aerobic – 4 x 1k at 3km speed with 2:30 rest

Day 12 Start the cycle again

Now, that looks pretty tough and it is! But a study of Kenyan full-time 5km runners shows that this is precisely the type of work they do. Haile Gebrselassie (Ethiopia) told one of the writers’ athletes that his favourite session was 50 x 400m at 63 secs with thirty secs rest!

But, we have to study our bodies. For example, a Dublin 5km runner aged over 30 had the ambition of running sub 14-minutes. He was put on the above type schedule. He reported that he was not recovering enough from the previous day’s work when starting a fresh day.

He was put on jogging 30 mins the day after each of the above workouts. This meant that the 10 day training cycle was extended to 22 days. He regained his freshness and realised his ambition (13:58 / 5km).

A female 5km runner (15:49), took a different line. She calculated that after the third consecutive day of training she needed a day off. She was later able to extend this to four consecutive days and a day off. With perseverance and adjustment the whole cycle can be accommodated in its entirety within 12 weeks.

Second source is this excerpt from the Kenny Moore book about Bowerman:

http://www.kennymoore.us/kcmarticles/The%20Man.pdf

Kenny wanted to do Lydiard. Bowerman realized Kenny needed more easy days and made Kenny take easy days under Bowerman's supervision.

The third source is Jan Olbrecht's graph called Timing of Super-Compensation. Unfortunately, I can no longer find a link to the graph. What the graph shows is varying recovery and supercompensation times ranging from 6-12 hours for easy aerobic workouts to 72+ hours for strength training and competition. Since he deals with swimmers a lot and we know swimmers recover quickly (e.g. Missy Franklin in London) recovery could be much longer for runners.

coach ari viderci

The 48 hours or 2 days of recovery.

What are you looking for ? I really don´t see the danger of a quite compete answer that inform both aspects, the general norm – 48 hours, and the other undeniable aspect – the need of recovery individualization. Science attitude is also generalization and systematization and be conclusive by hypothesis, thesis and synthesis and groups of classification, but the real world is not as that.

Each one of us is phisical, physiological and phychological different by nature and science definition, that´s why for DNA isn´t the same in each of billions of individuals. If we deal with any champion, any over doted talents, they got different physiology than the standard, and if we deal with ordinary, average or mediocre runners, they are also different than the mainstream. Ther´s the pattern of course that might built the norm, but we can´t miss the individualization and this is also part of the norm.

Are you looking for a common generalized time of recovery and the 48 hours satisfies you, or are you looking for one individualized, precise and accurate time define that might fits in every single case and better that just the common, an precise answer that doesn´t for that purpose doesn´t exist ? Or are you looking for an quite complete answer, that 48hours/2 days is the generalized length doesn´t, but ?

If I understood right, what Renato says it´s not deny the 48hours as recovery average, what some try to say is that the science that supports the 48hours/2days as common length of recovery is inaccurate, imprecise, it´s poor science because the length of recovery depends of the quality and quantity of each stimulus.

Is this in your 48hours opinion more correct than his one ?

Besides I guess that neither Renato or You or I or everyone we post here as we will do as pedagogy while teaching running distance approach or what build a kind of science run manual.

Here i was hoping for something more advanced that an answer about recovery length that is more advanced that we might read in any run book or run manual or hear in a class by a teach.

Personally i´m more engaged in read on LR.com threads about training opinions that attempt something better and advanced than what we might read in every ordinary run manual, as it´s the 48hours norm. If you want the norm, if you want the common sense or if you what ordinary training methods, you might run ways from this board. If you look for precise science or rocket science or academic-university opinions with credentials you might search other than LR.com

However let me essay one answer like a good class student. There you might comment if ther´s what is wrong and what is right and classified me as you would be the teacher and I would be the student, a good pupil.

It´s common-sense and generalized literature that the length of high distance training stimulus recovery to able correct overcompensation/supercompensation is about 2days or 48hours eventually. Howeverwe shall take care of the generalized conclusions, took from the most common cases. Since training requires training individualization if we think about different individuals the same kind of effort stiumulus might need shorter or longer recovery that the standard 48hours. Another point is that the same training effort done by the same individual in different occasions might need different recovery length, and also different kind of efforts might need different training recovery length.

Here you go SFM.