The Shorter The Race Distance, The More Running Sessions Per Week!!!

300m to 600m per session? Why? Why not 200-300m, maybe? I read Charlie's book. Must have been a different edition to the one you read! :)

You are talking about "facts". Please re-read my o.p. I am postulating what training "could" (should?) be for sprints vs distance. Has training changed over the decades? Have we reached a point where it is now perfected and won't change in the future?

Skuj wrote:

(Kind of related to "Event Specificity" and all that.)

Sprinters are the ones who need 12-14 runs a week, not Marathoners.

Sprinters must sprint, then shut it down. That shutdown will occur after not very much volume, no doubt!

Marathoners must put in big-skuj sessions, then recover. That recovery will not be a mere 6-8hrs. I believe that marathon WR holders of the future will be one-run-a-day people. What does an 8km morning run do for a Marathoner? Marathoners should always go longish.

Discuss.

No doubt that marathoners need volume. Duh! To state that and then suggest that future WR marathoners will run once a day shows a lack of higher logical thinking. Please think through your question before posting or you will be considered somewhat of a troll by the knowledgeable people inhabiting this board.

Could you believe Charlie Francis having good things to say about Arthur Lydiard? In fact, progress in sprint training seems to mirror what has happened in distance in the last 40-50 years. All the endurance stuff--jogging, running XC to "get strong"--is gone from modern methods (many don't even do jogging duing warmups), there was a period of more emphasis on more pure speed with lower volume, and now there is some more imphasis on speed endurance and special endurance with somewhat higher volumes at somewhat slower paces following Clyde Hart. You can see the latter in Lance Brauman's training for Gay, Spearmon, and Victoria Campbell.

But there are some fundametal truths. Sprint or Marathon, muscles still require ~36 hours to rebuild after a hard session, and the issue is worse for sprints because the recovery for the central nervous system (which distance people cannot stress as much because the CNS doesn't let them go as far into oxygen dept, and there is research to show this) is significantly longer.

Also, Mo's weight sessions in season are things like 10-8-6-4-2 on squats, with the 2 being @ 435 pounds. If distance people were stressing their CNS like this 3-4 times a week, they would also train less.

Distance people often want to complain about sprinters not training enough, but consider the money. Mo demanded--and got--~$100,000 per race in appearance fees. Asafa asked for $100,000 at Zurich and was refused because they were already paying Gay $50,000 (remember, OFFICIALLY, Zurich wasn't going to do appearance fees). There is so much money at stake that if it was possible without failing a drug test to train more than the 7-10 total sessions a week and get faster, somebody would certainly do it. Most top sprinters already have physical therapy after every hard workout to speed recovery, and there is only so much stree the body can handle without breaking down.

If you were to compare Meb with Gay you would find the number of hard sessions is about the same, while Meb wlll do more easy sessions because (1) He can; and (2) He gets more out of it.

I'm not suggesting 14 CNS sessions a week for sprinters.

PS: Hello, A.S. How's things? :)

Skuj wrote:

I am postulating what training "could" (should?) be for sprints vs distance. Has training changed over the decades? Have we reached a point where it is now perfected and won't change in the future?

You are not allowed to use words unless you know what they mean.

This is what I meant, then: :)

postulate

verb postulated, postulating

1. To assume or suggest something as the basis for discussion; to take it for granted.

Thesaurus: theorize, hypothesize, assume, predicate, suppose, take for granted, presuppose, stipulate, propose, advance, lay down, posit.

2. To demand; to claim.

Thesaurus: implore, beg, request, demand, ask, question.

3. church law.

To nominate someone to an office or post, subject to the sanction of a higher authority.

noun

1. A stipulation or prerequisite.

2. A position assumed as self-evident.

Derivative: postulation

noun

Etymology: 16c: from Latin postulare to demand.

I'm off for a couple of hours, mushroom hunting, and when I come back, I'm sure we'll have pages upon pages of mature postulating! :)

Later,

Darren Skuja

www.cvrr.ca

I think the benefit from twice-a-day workouts is simply that they give you a good way to increase the total volume of aerobic work without the stress on the body of constantly doing really long workouts. While there's some specificity benefit to doing long workouts for a marathon runner, the recovery requirements are longer as well.

I don't know that this is an exact parallel because the physiological processes are different at different speeds, but the original question is a bit like asking "Why doesn't a 5k runner just run a hard 5k instead of 5x1000 at race pace?" By breaking the workout into smaller chunks, you can do the same volume of work without exhausting yourself and requiring as much recovery.

All that said, there are elite runners who don't follow the mandatory 2 a day plan. I read a quote from Bob Larsen (maybe in Runner's World) that said Meb runs single workouts a lot of the time because they allow him to cut out a lot of "junk" miles from warming up and cooling down twice a day. And Meb seems to be running pretty well. There's always more than one way to skin a cat.

Skuj wrote: You are talking about "facts". Please re-read my o.p. I am postulating what training "could" (should?) be for sprints vs distance. Has training changed over the decades? Have we reached a point where it is now perfected and won't change in the future?

I guess I missed the part where you gave any indication whatsoever why your frequency-inverse-of-distance hypothesis either could or should be effective, plausible, or even interesting.

On the one hand we have zillions of man-years of empirical evidence of what's worked and what hasn't. True, if we were always satisfied sticking with whatever worked yesterday, we'd never progress. But that's practically a trivial footnote, compared to how immensely valuable all this real-world testing of ideas is to us, compared to even the best deductive speculation of the foremost exercise physiologists, let alone the unsupported offhand speculations of Skuj.

So what is it that compels you to suggest that all of the best runners on both ends of the spectrum have it all wrong now, and that years from now the champion sprinters will be the ones running doubles while the champion marathoners will be once a day?

And as a followup - do you suppose sprinters haven't tried training more frequently? How about marathoners and less frequently? Given that your protocols haven't really "stuck" yet, can you speculate what the sprinters and marathoners might've been doing wrong? Or maybe they actually enjoyed tremendous success but didn't stick with it because it didn't suit their temperaments? What's the deal?

P.S. Any luck with the shrooms?

I'm eating a great big Portabella as I type. And I also found some Oyster Shrooms. Yum!

Oh yes, we have it all figured out after, um, 120 years of "modern athletics"? We are now at the level of perfection. No need to postulate or think beyond / outside anymore. Every coach can simply follow what has been done. The world records will continue to be broken by doing the same thing exactly. Never watch the hurricane from above. Only being in the eye of it gives the best perspective.

God, these shrooms are good.

What kind of non-sprinting running can sprinters do in order to support / enhance the sporadic CNS work?

Skuj wrote: God, these shrooms are good.

Glad to hear it. Fungus can be mighty tasty, for sure.

Oh yes, we have it all figured out after, um, 120 years of "modern athletics"? We are now at the level of perfection. No need to postulate or think beyond / outside anymore.

OK, got it. You have nothing special in support of your thesis, it's just you know the experts (1) are wrong so therefore the opposite of what they say is probably true. Fair enough.

Prove 'em wrong with good experiments or better yet athletic successes, and you'll make a real name for yourself. Then when you say "discuss" they'll have little choice!

We don't know everything there is to know about physics either. And just between me 'n you, gravity's a myth. Shhhh!

(1) surrogates for parents, teachers, "society"

Elite marathons can recover in 10-12 hours or less. They don't need 24 hours.

140-160mpw on singles? doable, but they would go way to slow and not use the correct energy systems.

These guys are running fast. Don't forget that.

"But, this is the way it's always been done...."

Are we training perfectly? Are there other methods that we will be exploring in decades to come? Possibly?

I'm trying to look forward, not backwards. Training is a science and an art. Gravity is not art. You cannot argue with it, or debate it.

Look at training 20, 50 years ago.

Kents, they can recover in 10-12hrs from WHAT, exactly?

Charlie Pendejo, you are assuming that most of the current best sprinters are doing a few running sessions per week, and all the best Marathoners are doing 12-14 running sessions per week. You are assuming that most of the experts say this is so. Is it so?

please dont squeeze the garmin wrote:

Skuj wrote: God, these shrooms are good.

Glad to hear it. Fungus can be mighty tasty, for sure.

Oh yes, we have it all figured out after, um, 120 years of "modern athletics"? We are now at the level of perfection. No need to postulate or think beyond / outside anymore.

OK, got it. You have nothing special in support of your thesis, it's just you know the experts (1) are wrong so therefore the opposite of what they say is probably true. Fair enough.

Prove 'em wrong with good experiments or better yet athletic successes, and you'll make a real name for yourself. Then when you say "discuss" they'll have little choice!

We don't know everything there is to know about physics either. And just between me 'n you, gravity's a myth. Shhhh!

(1) surrogates for parents, teachers, "society"

So just toss in a little comic sensibility and you'll be recasting Woody Allen's "Sleeper" into the world of running. You know what I'm talking about...

C'mon Skuj, with your love for film, running background, and vision of the future, you're uniquely qualified to make this film. You gotta do it, man. I'd pay to see it in the theater!

Heck, you were just out foraging for food. Remember the giant vegetables in the film? It's plainly a sign this was meant to be!

Coach D,

What would you classify as high intensity? Are we talking all out sprint here? What of the volume of pace work per week for say the 400m elite runner?

I suppose what i really would like to know is how much volume at paces of an intersity just below what you classify as "high" ?

Haha...Charlie, yer a funny guy.

Is that the one where someone says something like "This food tastes awful, and the portions are way too small"?

I happen to think that around the 2hr mark of a training run, much benefit is gleaned for marathoners. And if we do such a duration only once a week, we, as in Marathoners, are sacrificing something. 120min, not 2x60min. OK, 60min obvioulsy works sometimes. But imho, marathoners should go long often. Specificity and all that.

Discuss.

A) you have a really unfortunate name.

B) what is the difference between a 5k/10k runner and a marathoner? This is a rhetorical question.

The answer? Not much. How many examples will we need (Shorter, Viren, Salazar, Lopes, Treacy, Steve Jones, Tergat, Geb, Felix Limo, etc.) before we start to understand that the events are very similar and YES the marathon is 4 times longer but not that different in its demands ... and this is proven by history and countless examples of men excelling in both in short time frames.

Skooj,

Do you know anything about how HGH works and why we generally run twice a day?

These questions always seem to be posed by somebody who has not tried running twice a day and seen its benefits firsthand. I did it in 7th grade and then again in 9th and 10th and 11th and ... I got it long before the end of the second time.