Brojo bullshit hard/easy

I don't know. I say run 28:06 or better and then get back to me.

What you say is interesting because I came away with the complete opposite conclusion from that Cabral/Hadd thread: the longer (ST) distance guy (like Lopes) would be doing more tempo running and less intense interval sessions (so more along the lines of medium-hard each day) and the middle (FT) distance type (like Mamede) would be running very intense interval sessions with slower recovery running days in between.

Overall, I did find the thread confusing so I could have got it mixed up.

I read Canadah's comment's a couple of times. Like you I am not sure which way is correct. I think Cabral said Lopes did more tempo and Mamede used slower recovery with faster intervals.

But, Lopes was not as high a mileage guy as WeJo and Lopes almost never ran longer than 90 minutes so I think if you want to run longer you need to run slower recovery.

As for Mamede, he certainly went very easy in between. He certainly ran fast intervals, the question is were they very intense or just indicative of his FT makeup? Like Hadd says, the problem of a FT is not the speed but putting the fast running together. Yet, Mamede used near complete rest between his longer intervals and he never did that many shorter intervals with short rest.

How about everyone acknowledge that different things work for different people?

Also the event which one is training for as to be taken into account. High mileage training for the marathon is more conducive to hard / easy while training for the 5k can be very different

Know Thyself.

Is it possible there is a relationship between individual success with ((hard-hard-easy-easy) vs. (hard-easy-hard-easy) vs. (med-med-med-hard)) as well as high mileage/low mileage and body fiber composition?

Maybe people with higher percentage fast twitch muscle fibers benefit more from a hard-easy style, while slow twitch runners benefit from more moderate training day after day with an occasional hard workout etc.

What's the point of running if it's so slow though? If it's a "recovery day" and no hard effort why not just walk or sleep or something? And who says you need a whole day set aside for a recovery run? Maybe you can just immediately get a nap afterwards and then a couple hours of sleep the next day and be ready to go again?

Haile says he won't run slower than 7 minute 12 second mile pace (he said 4:30 kilometer pace) even on easy days, so was Geb's 7:12 the same as Wejo's 8:00 pace, meaning that anything slower than 8:00 would be counted worthless too?

I meant "and a couple of extra* hours of sleep the next day"

The Waterboy wrote:

Haile says he won't run slower than 7 minute 12 second mile pace (he said 4:30 kilometer pace) even on easy days, so was Geb's 7:12 the same as Wejo's 8:00 pace, meaning that anything slower than 8:00 would be counted worthless too?

Why do so many of you care about pace? It doesn't matter, run by feel. If you are working hard to try to stay under some arbitrary pace standard like 7:12 you aren't getting anything out of the run and it will hurt you in the long run.

PS: There is no such thing as too slow when talking about recovery. There is such thing as too fast.

Because it's still running and makes you fitter, but if you run it like you'd run on a previous harder day you'd eventually break down. The easy day is an easy TRAINING day, not a day off.

newname wrote:

I think you need to go back and read what you wrote. Do you really want to have said that "elites" run 4:39 pace for 10 mile runs and "do it most days"?

No, I just defined 'tempo' as being around their HM pace. Many many people use "the pace you can sustain for an hour", which is their HM pace and (sadly) nearer my 10-miler pace. I did not say they will be doing 10 miles each day at HM pace.

If running at this pace daily I'd imagine they warm up slowly and work down to this progressively for 3-5 miles. Certainly that's what the numerous Kenyans who spend their summer in my corner of London seem to do, that's what Toby Tanser describes, and that's what Bakken says a lot of kenyans do. Read his article.

Plenty of people run a bit slower and a bit longer (Cram, Ovett, Solinsky) most days too. I don't believe there is a single pace with magical powers.

Aghast wrote:

Also the event which one is training for as to be taken into account.

Agree 100%

High mileage training for the marathon is more conducive to hard / easy while training for the 5k can be very different

And I'd have thought the exact opposite! Training at 5k pace is by definition fast - you can't do more than 3-5 miles of it even with rests - so you will need easy days. I can, however, imagine doing a couple of miles warmup and a decent run at marathon pace for several days in a row.

Maybe both systems would work for most athletes if they gave it a go. Maybe we can't clone ourselves and do the controlled experiments on what systems work for us before our careers are over, and it's luck whether you hit on the system that 'works for you'. Training sucks, eh?

The Waterboy wrote:

What's the point of running if it's so slow though?

I grant you, this is the real mystery.

If you did two good quality aerobic workouts and some technical stuff (Tues reps, Thu drills/strides, Sat tempo or XC race), and NO other running, but you dieted fanatically to stay as lean as a whippet, how far would you get? There is a guy in my club in his late thirties who does four runs a week, as he decided that was the time he could spare, and he's running brilliantly.

The general concept of "overload + recovery => progress" makes perfect sense, but non-distance-runners just can't get their head round why overlaying an extra 60mpw on top of those basic stimuli should make you so much faster.

Experimentally, it just seems to work.

haha YO wrote:

PS: There is no such thing as too slow when talking about recovery. There is such thing as too fast.

I think there is a pace for most people below which it ceases to get easier.

Even when I am completely shattered, I end up at 8:00 or faster after the first mile. In the absence of a really specific muscle soreness or injury, slowing it down further would make it no easier, just more boring. For Geb it's 4:30/kilometre (7:12)

HRE wrote:

If you're measuring hard and easy against what those terms mean for the overall running population, that's true. But hard and easy are individual matters. Haikkola used to talk about how important easy days were to Viren but he'd add that Viren's easy days would kill a lot of runners.

Right. For the same reason intervals can be easy and daily runs might be harder. For instance intervals can be more aerobic and one long run or one regular daily run can be more anaerobic. For the same reason low mileage can be harder but higher percent of aerobic system than high mileage don´t.

Sometimes things aren't as it seems to be in the first glance.

Finnaly you look smart.

In my opinion the science physiology as well as the rich training methodology proves that in the distance run sport the specific/hard workout demand it takes 48hours minimum, let´s say 2 days minimum, with soft aerobic runs to get active recovery up to the next hard demand effort.

I can’t deny that the length of the recovery to able good overcompensation it depends of several variables, the individual one, the facilities and so.

Meanwhile it’s a fact that we knew about some runners that on non-linear type of periodization they are able to follow an hard-easy day microcycle or more and harder than that, 3 up to 5 hard days in 7 days in a row of training without overtraining. Besides that strong runners are exceptions to the science and methodology norm, here the question is if they wouldn’t reach the same plateau of shape condition, best overcompensation, and top performance, with more easy days and just less hard days in the micro and mesocycle.

Another question is what you mean by hard day. A distance runner be a middle distance runner or long distance runner if he trains down to the classic 4mmol/l lactate in every day basis – be continuous aerobic runs or intervals – and if he considers that a hard days - I may admit he can do many of that days on one week schedule. In my opinion that kind of schedule digest that the runner doesn’t produce higher lactate than 4mmol for a long period of time or rarely does, he will never get out his best performance ability. It’s why, among other aspects, the non-linear periodization with moderate modulation it’s required to take out the best of the runner talent of we consider a long term career. Modern training that is build and starts from the aerobic condition in the early cycle, but moves up from intensity up to a certain plateau in an harmonized conjugation of the anaerobic and anaerobic efforts, down to quantity (volume), that the quantity/volume focus on the strength endurance variant, and not as on the past outdate methodology, when the training periodization was going from big blocks of quantity and delay it get down to big blocks of intensity.

The runner that trains with hard days of specific workouts be intervals or whatever, he needs 2 easy days at least of soft active demand to recover and correct overcompensation. In my opinion one 5000m/10000m runner shall goon hard days up of 4mmol/l up, sometimes up to 8-10-12mmol because in the 5000m and 10000m runs you get that high lactate concentration, and this can´t be done while training with the miss of intervals in the training package for a along period of time.

One final note. As a coach I had been several runners that come to me with a past training pattern of hard-easy day or hard-hard-easy day. When I put them on a hard-easy-easy-hard or hard-easy-easy-easy-hard days. With my training, or their new training pattern, normally they do best physical and mental approach to face more training volume, as they have most positive report from hard sessions as well, and last but not least, with more frewuency of easy days in their schedule they improved their Pbs.

Antonio Cabral wrote:

Modern training that is build and starts from the aerobic condition in the early cycle, but moves up from intensity up to a certain plateau in an harmonized conjugation of the anaerobic and anaerobic efforts, down to quantity (volume), that the quantity/volume focus on the strength endurance variant, and not as on the past outdate methodology, when the training periodization was going from big blocks of quantity and delay it get down to big blocks of intensity.

I want to be more precise what i want mean by start the periodization training process with progressive quality and then move to volume further up.

By volume i want to mean more volume litterly, but as every performance progress is an extensive process every specific training for the distance event is an extend process always. Extend the volume means the strenght endurance also named resiatnce in some other nomenclature. Maintain and extend the intensity is done with long workout distance at the same fast pace.

So it looks like we have to take multiple variables into account:

1. The event distance we are training for

2. Individual differences in physiology (mainly the facts of our ST/FT muscle fiber ratios, injury resistance, and the runing on and off of specific genes that stimulate ideal adaptation.)

3. Periodization of workouts within a speficic time frame (ie a season) to build upon eachother and develop peak fitness when it counts the most.

4. An Individual's training history in terms of years run, types of training performed and cumulative lifetime miles.

Furthermore, the variable change of how one adpats to certain training (ie most basic levels of volume and average intensity) over longer periods of time. For example, after a certain training phase of 3 months one may become overtrained and race poorly - however, after repeating that same exact phase of 3 months a second time the individual may supercompensate and improve considerably.

There is a very fine line between overtraining and ideally training and the delicate balance of volume, intensity of easy runs, and density of harder workouts is an individual journey that may take some time to figure out.