better off without intervals??

Does the coach say she never does intervals, or that she responds better to threshold work?

Could be a mental approach to the idea of an interval workout.

Workout #1: 2 mile warm-up, 10 x 400m in 75 seconds with 90 sec recovery, 2 mile cool-down

Workout #2: 2 mile warm-up, 25 minutes of 75 seconds hard, 90 sec easy, 2 mile cool-down

Same workout, same stimulus, but workout #1 is, for many runners, considered easier because they approach each rep as a single unit and focus more during that rep.

But there are other runners that would prefer to be given the second workout. During the 25 minutes, they are always focused on the workout as a whole, not a single rep.

Coach has to be part psychologist when working with athletes.

They might have been differentiating intervals as hard, fast work, like mile pace or faster, and tempo/threshold work as 10k-HM pace, even though they might be done in an interval format (but 1-2mi intervals).

Some runners need a lot more of one type of training or the other.

In his book The Sports Gene, David Epstein says in college he would come into the season out of shape and get stronger from all the training and racing while his teammate would work off-season and start in very good shape but wore down over time.

95 % of the time an athlete is going to execute Workout #2 to a less intense degree than Workout #1. So many Fartlek runs end up working as less strenuous (in a good way) because of the lack of confinement in certain time quotas that you ask (i.e. workout #1). Just what I have found with most of mine throughout the year.

so in the case of making the workout more of a fartlek, the intensity is simply decreased? I can see how that would be better at times. But I'm still not sure how Runner A, who has come into the season in better shape, does not get at least the same benefit from the interval workout as Runner B, and stays x amount ahead, unless it's, as Seidel's coach seems to imply, some runners respond better to longer tempo-style workouts. But can running intervals ever make a runner slower? It seems that would only happen if they tired the runner out too much to race effectively....

I don't think intervals would ever effectively slow someone down, it just may not be the most efficient way to train.

Going back to the mental part of training - some runners treat some workouts, especially intervals, as rigid times that they must hit, regardless of whether they are running relaxed or digging into all that they have.

Those runners that crush their goal rep times at all cost often feel out of place in a race longer than 800m, when being relaxed and ready to compete in the later 1/4 of race is most important.

If you practice controlled breathing, efficiency in motion, and patience, then you will feel very at ease in the developing stages of a longer race.

Tempo runs and thresholds are more about teaching that "feel" than hitting times.

Interestingly, Emma Bates seemed to have a certain pace drilled into her race plan. 68 second lap for lap 22, that's the plan! Well, even as I am sure she did some training to be ready to make that move, it was no problem for half a dozen runners to go around her since they were all running on feel.

Racing styles have changed since intervals were the big thing. A video of the 1980 Olympic mens 5000m shows the leaders, including Mr. Fartlek himself Lasse Viren, constantly fighting for the lead during the entire race - train as you race. Just a boxing match!

There are too many examples of athletes who've thrived without intervals or any form of repetitions to list. There a vast differences in individuals in response to training modalities.

Often the athlete who does best on no repetitions gravitates towards almost daily high end aerobic running.

There are just too many ways to do intervals and repetitions for ANYBODY to be truly better off without them.

I can´t believe that all idiots on this thread have failed to come up with the obvious answer: Yes, there are some runners who doesn´t respond well to intervals/fartlek workouts. I´m an example of that myself. I have all my PBs from seasons where I only did strong, continuous running. After a season with that kind of training people would say "imagine how much faster you would have been with intervals, so I started doing stuff like 8x3 min/90s off on the road and after a few of those sessions my race times would start to be worse.

I also tried really intense stuff, like 10x400 on the track and that did´t work either. Neither did hill repeats or unstructured fartlek.

Ron Clarke, who did almost no interval work and almost exclusively did fast, steady runs, told me that after he broke his first world record a well known Australian coach who'd immigrated from Europe told him, "Not bad for only fartlek. But think how fast you could have run if you'd done intervals." Ron's comment was that it just showed how attached coaches are to interval work.

Most coaches seem to love intervals. It's much easier to monitor an interval session that a distance run unless the coach is along on the distance run and it's easier to impress people, including the athletes themselves often times, with great interval sessions than with other kinds of runs.

I found that intervals slowed me. I found racing was a better way to sharpen. My best racing came from distance runs that were comfortably fast (for me). My youngest son also seems to slow with short, fast reps but handles longer or slower reps and steady runs fairly well. We don't know how he'd run on no intervals at all because he's always been on teams that do intervals regularly. On the other hand, Lydiard told me that his third wife was very keen on distance work but hated intervals. He seemed to feel that she was holding her running back by avoiding them.

As you say, there are plenty of examples of people who have run very well with little or no rep work. That doesn't mean that everyone would be better off without intervals. Obviously they're effective or they wouldn't be such a big part of training and there are loads of physiological studies claiming that they're effective. The trick for a good coach or self coached athlete is to figure out whether they're better off with lots, little, or no rep work. But generally I think interval work is over emphasized.

Of course there are runners (like yourself) who end up responding less well to interval work. For the vast majority of athletes, however, it's pretty obvious that interval workouts are the way to go, no other type of workout routine has such a long standing record of success. That doesn't mean that other elements in an athletes training plans aren't important to improvement (tempos, fartleks, etc.) but interval workouts are where the vast majority of athletes will find the biggest gains.

Read this classic letsrun thread:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=309865

This is an easy explanation. If repeat training is slowing you down then you are overtraining. Not hard to figure out. What most people dont understand is that repeats dont have to be some unreal speed.

Bob Schul is the king of this type of training. I coach at his HS. I am very familiar with this training. What people dont understand is that most of his training was very submaximal. Very few repeats at race pace even though he might run for 2 hours of nothing but 150-700 meter repeats

BTW- lets use the correct terminology. Geesh I thought this place had experts on it. The interval is the term used to describe the break time between the hard runs. Those hard runs are called repeats.

HRE,

Please explain. "I found that intervals slowed me."

Do you mean that running 16 x 200 at 800-1200 pace 3 times a week slowed you?

Do you mean that running repeat 800s at your dream 5k pace twice a week slowed you?

I find it very easy to believe that overdoing intervals slows just about everyone.

It means that when I'd start doing intervals regularly, usually once or twice a week, my races would end up being slower than when I was not doing intervals. That took lots of forms over many years but was really noticeable once I was in my 40s. Also, I could NEVER do interval workouts at race paces. I used to drive my college coach nuts because we'd do 440s and I'd end up running them 5-10 seconds slower than the pace I'd race at for 5-6 miles and be fading. Once I got out of college and mostly gave up interval work I improved a lot and enjoyed running more.

I was like this in HS, and college. Bottom line was that I raced my workouts. In HS, anything less than an all-out effort in a workout was considered a failure, and rewarded by being yelled at by the coaches. In college, I didn't know any better and ran all the workouts all-out, like I did in HS. This was the mid/late 90s.

For both HS and college, I would get worse as the season went on. Typically by mid-Oct I was running over 30 seconds slower for 5k than at the start of the season. In college even worse over 8k. I just assumed there was something wrong with me and I wasn't working hard enough. In Nov I was just done. Nothing left to give.

Wasn't until after college that I found a coach, who after one workout laughed at how hard I ran. He told me that I'd have to run each workout at exactly the pace he told me, or the workout was over. Took a few workouts where he stopped them after a few intervals before I got the message. Took about 6 months of training with him where I was running what I considered easy workouts to PR by over 45 seconds and suddenly become a

Part got cut off.

Took about 6 months of training with him where I was running what I considered easy workouts to PR by over 45 seconds and suddenly become a less-than 14:30 5k runner, and moved from local road race hero to regional road race hero. HS and college running were wasted. Would have been better off not running in the off-season for both.

bob Schul type of guy wrote:

This is an easy explanation. If repeat training is slowing you down then you are overtraining. Not hard to figure out. What most people dont understand is that repeats dont have to be some unreal speed.

Bob Schul is the king of this type of training. I coach at his HS. I am very familiar with this training. What people dont understand is that most of his training was very submaximal. Very few repeats at race pace even though he might run for 2 hours of nothing but 150-700 meter repeats

BTW- lets use the correct terminology. Geesh I thought this place had experts on it. The interval is the term used to describe the break time between the hard runs. Those hard runs are called repeats.

Yeah, totally agree with this. If interval workouts don't work for you then you aren't doing them right. Maybe you're doing them too hard, too often, too short, too fast, too little rest, etc. A lot of college programs seem to just hammer race pace intervals with short rest until the athletes are on the verge of breakdown. Increasing the rest and the total volume while slightly decreasing the intensity has worked very well for me. I try to take the approach that most people seem to reserve for tempo runs or steady runs and apply that to interval workouts. So for me an interval workout is about getting in a large amount of volume (usually about 5 miles if I'm training for a 5k) at a certain pace range (say, 65-72 seconds/lap) all the while keeping the effort comfortably hard. I'm not saying this is necessarily the best way to do things, but if you haven't had success with workouts like 6x800 at 3k pace with 1:00 recovery or whatever the hell coaches are having you do, I think it's worth trying.