PR'ing in the 5k or 10k while training for HM or marathon. Did you do this?

why does this happen wrote:

The 5k/10k plans in his third edition have three workouts every week. Long/M run, I/R run, and tempo. He also says to go straight to phase II if you've been running consistently.

The marathon plans seem more gently, particularly the 2Q plan, although I have never trained under one of his marathon plans so I really don't have any experience to reference.

I haven't read the 3rd edition. Just got done rereading the 2nd edition for the umpteenth time. I've heard from others - especially here on LR - that the 3rd edition marathon plans are crap. I don't know if he changed his 5/15km plan, but that plan in the 2nd edition has three quality workouts per week. That plan is killer, but it's by no means a marathon training plan.

No, but I PR'd in the Half Marathon training for the 5k/10K.

Coach Jeff- can you share some more details about your long base building? I’ve slogged through a few marathon seasons, like you training seemed to break me down more than help and the marathons have been no where close to the equivalent shorter races. I know I need more miles and plan to try to spend the next 5 or so months building miles/base before kicking off training for NYC.

Wanna bq wrote:

Coach Jeff- can you share some more details about your long base building? I’ve slogged through a few marathon seasons, like you training seemed to break me down more than help and the marathons have been no where close to the equivalent shorter races. I know I need more miles and plan to try to spend the next 5 or so months building miles/base before kicking off training for NYC.

If your base-phase is breaking you down, you are running too fast. Easy days = easy. Hard days = crawl back to the door.

I did not PR in 5k. (Even ignoring college 5k PR where I was training harder.) The circumstances surrounding my post college 5k training and my HM training were very similar and offer a good comparison.

Similarities:

Near zero mileage for at least 1 year prior. A clean slate.

About 6 months very slow buildup of mileage. Unstructured, moderately paced, hard when I felt like it.

Added workouts at 40-50mpw and spent 2-3 months working on general fitness

Capped mileage between 65-75 mpw.

4 months buildup to race.

Differences

I was 25 during the 5k cycle and 30 during the HM.

My 5k training looked like a miler extending to 5k (because that's the way I enjoy training).

My HM training is typical. Tons of tempo pace and slower. Some 10k paces, and 5k occasionally.

5k time during my 5k training was 15:00 (track, good weather, lots of comp)

5k time during HM training was 15:33 (road, flat, perfect weather, no comp.)

Considering the course and competition I would say they are more like 15s apart. My HM phase is about over, and I plan to do about 8 weeks of 5k training to see if I can better that 15:00 time.

FWIW, I am a middle of the road FT/ST guy. I ran 1500m in college and did ok, but 3k/5k was probably where I should have been.

I actually pr'd in the 10K during a tune up half marathon during a marathon training block.

Smoove, I know you're a Daniels devotee and I appreciate that you're a thoughtful coach, but I think this comment of yours as a defense of Daniels is wrong : "But that isn't really bad physiology, it is bad coaching". That makes it sound like it's the readers' fault and not Daniels', but they're following what JD's book suggests! You're basically saying "his book is great if you just apply the principles and disregard/modify the schedules." But it's not like the "principles" are some great gift to the running world since, let's face it, there are not a lot of secrets (some combo of high-end aerobic work, long run, race pace work, top-end speed work, etc). I think for most readers the point of having the book is to get a blueprint in the form of the VDOTs and sample schedules, and he fails with the most critical part (or at least the most dangerous part!). So, sure, Daniels' "physiology" may not be wrong (though, truth be told, I think it is in fact wrong in the sense that his zone training stuff is a crock), but he's selling all these books and, sadly, people are following the training schedules! Not just clubs I've seen, but lots of high school coaches too. Though I still wouldn't like Daniels due to his overreliance on I-pace and T-pace as meaningful paces, the running world would be well-served if he had some better guidelines along the lines of the ones that Tom "Tinman Schwartz" gives for his CV-pace workouts in which he bases the total volume in minutes on a formula of 420 minutes divided by 5km race time. So a faster runner runs more CV reps (in total time and volume) than a slower runner, regardless of mileage. Sure, these kinds of things are rules of thumb and can be adjusted by a smart coach, but if you're writing for a broad audience, it's a necessity to have something like this as a good starting point in order to avoid doing the damage that Daniels' books do. Anyway, maybe this would be a good discussion for its own thread...

Well, it certainly wouldn't be the first time I am wrong, and won't be the last.

Look, the book is meant to be a guide and meant to be something that the masses can use as a starting point. I don't think it is fair to compare what Daniels says in a book to what Tinman says on his website or in a blog or on a message board - they are different fora that require different approaches.

That being said, I agree that if people just buy the book to follow the formulae and training plans, they are certainly undermining their training. But I kind of feel like saying that is akin to the person who buys hot coffee and then sues McDonald's when they spill the hot coffee on themselves and burn themselves. It is not that extreme, but the root idea is the same - if you are negligent in how you apply a useful item, the person who provided the useful item shares in the blame.

I also have been left with the feeling that Daniels has at times - particularly with respect to the third edition of his book - been more interested in selling books than in breaking new scientific ground.

But to say "A Daniels style approach isn't an appropriate way to train because (a) his book for the masses isn't fine tuned enough for specific users, (b) beginners are going to ignore the principles and just follow the training plans and (c) he is interested in making money from his book so he made it as general as possible" is throwing the baby out with the bath water. All of those things may be true, but the first two really aren't on Daniels, and the third is a natural outcome of writing a book. Heck, Daniels used to come on these boards and expound upon his principles with particularity, so he certainly gave some free advice along the way.

Daniels is not the be-all and end-all of training. Others have used a science based approach to alternative training approaches (Magness) or had great success without really delving with the detail of Daniels into the specific science of why they are doing what they are doing (Canova and Tinman). But if you read the book itself, and focus on the core principles, a canned Daniels approach is a great way to get started, and it can be refined over time to be applied to more advanced runners once you have the experience to understand what adjustments those runners need.

Is it better than a Canova style funnel approach or the CV approach of Tinman? I can't say, but I can say it is a scientifically sound approach that has worked for me, my college teammates from back in the 90s when Daniels was at the zenith of coaching, and for the people that I have coached since.

Basically, I spent about 6 months running no faster than my Maffetone HR. You can google that. It is really freaking slow. With a HRmax of over 200, I "ran" at 132bpm. Months of cursing at high volume as the watch beeped and beeped and beeped every time I exceeded a pathetic jog. After that, I followed the Hadd approach for about 3 months. Google that. Then I was finally ready to jump into the Pfitz 55 plan. I hit all of my training paces. On race day, I went out faster than planned, but it felt right and it was within 20 seconds of an even split. I nailed it that day. 15 minute PR at 3:15. This is after years of trying and failing to break 3:30.

You'd be sub 3 if you just trained properly and stopped dancing between extremes.

You don't know JD wrote:

I haven't read the 3rd edition. Just got done rereading the 2nd edition for the umpteenth time. I've heard from others - especially here on LR - that the 3rd edition marathon plans are crap. I don't know if he changed his 5/15km plan, but that plan in the 2nd edition has three quality workouts per week. That plan is killer, but it's by no means a marathon training plan.

I recently followed the 2Q plan in the 3rd Edition - I would disagree that these plans are crap.

I started out the plan with a 5k effort of 18:06 and had the intention of maintaining 40 miles per week throughout the build-up to the Houston Marathon. I ended up averaging only 28 miles per week due to a couple of injuries along the way. The only thing that was consistent in my training was hitting the Q1 workouts (e.g. the most important per JD). I ended up running 2:59 at Houston and I have no doubt that if I had been able to hit my goal mileage and follow the plan I would've been a lot closer to the estimated 2:53 based on my VDOT initially.

I'm going to give the 5k plan a try next with the goal of breaking 17:00 this summer, so I'll be able to give some feedback then if the 3 workouts per week are difficult. Just glancing through the plan I see that pretty much every long run is either 25% of weekly mileage or 120 minutes, whatever is shorter - so not too significant. For me running 50 miles per week, that'll just be a 12.5 mile run as EASY pace. No big deal. So really it's just the other 2 workouts.

Smoove, I certainly won't knock Daniels, as I have benefited from his plans and improved as a runner. My complaints are small. That said, I think that he may be better served offering up more aerobic work for runners with, say, less than 5 (maybe more) years of consistent training. I think that he overestimates most runners aerobic ability. Also, anyone that's placing at Boston is a bit of a freak, so you're not exactly a fair representation of the masses.

I am going to make a change to my training and see how things go. Long runs will stay about the same. Replacing all R and I paced workouts with M paced long tempo workouts in the 6-8 mile range, with the exception of a series of weekly I paced workouts starting 5 weeks out from a race. Replace most, but not all, tempo workouts with 10k paced reps. Probably still do a Daniels 20 minute tempo every three weeks or so.

Sub 3 would be nice. I got to sub 330 at the “extremes “ and I think I might get sub 310. If I plateau using this method, I’m definitely willing to change. Yeah, I might could actually sub 3. Dang.

We may all have different floors and ceilings, but we are all doing the same thing and facing the same challenges (subject to the caveat that we all also have different strengths and weakness as runners in the first place, but that is true regardless of your floor or ceiling).

You didn't ask my opinion, but I think those changes to the conventional Daniels approach are not a bad idea, with maybe one exception. I get why you want to dump the early R and I work, but I would keep some of the early I work in there. I think the fitness bumps that it brings early in the cycle, and the benefit that you enjoy throughout the cycle as a result, is worth the added stress on your body. Dropping the R stuff is less of an issue for sure. I don't love the addition of the M paced stuff, but I recognize that is a minority position and that most people think that Daniels doesn't give enough M paced work to make you comfortable with it, so I get it. Trading out some of the T work for 10k paced work makes a fair amount of sense to me - if you do cruise intervals, my suspicion is that you probably trend towards running faster than T pace in any event in many of those workouts, and the faster pace in this case will help with what you may be missing out on by limiting your early I paced work. My only other thought is that I would be careful with the I paced work at the end of they cycle if you are marathon rather than half-marathon focused. It can be an awful lot of stress on your body when it is already stressed as a result of the work that you had to put in to get ready for the marathon.

Unsolicited advice, so take it for what it is worth.

Maffetone is a quack, his age formula doesn't take into effect the following, caffeine intake, time of day running or body fat percentage. Not to mention everyone has different genetics and a one size fits all approach is just bull. People need to experiment and do what works best for them. I have friends who run sub 3 Mary who run easy runs 2 minutes slower than me. It works for them but it doesn't work for me. Running is the greatest sport because it is so individualized and training should be just as individualized.

Smoove wrote:

...

That being said, I agree that if people just buy the book to follow the formulae and training plans, they are certainly undermining their training. But I kind of feel like saying that is akin to the person who buys hot coffee and then sues McDonald's when they spill the hot coffee on themselves and burn themselves. It is not that extreme, but the root idea is the same - if you are negligent in how you apply a useful item, the person who provided the useful item shares in the blame.

...

As a lawyer, you should know better than to use the McDonalds coffee suit as an example, unless you're a DRI member, I suppose.

I'm a transactional lawyer - I had to Google DRI (it has a specific real estate meaning on Florida). I stand by the comparison.