Running doubles every day is really working!

This all sounds very encouraging. My coach unfortunately will not let me run doubles yet. Hopefully I will this winter though!

Why do you need to do them every day? And you build up to doubles, so you are right in saying adding 21 miles a week from your current mileage would not be smart.

If you are training to get better, I'd work on quality and effort, rather than simply putting in some time running a 1/2 mile.

I run doubles 6 days a week and have for eons. My old coach initially started me on them when I was running 60 MPW. We added a 3-4 miler just three days a week for the first 6 months to allow the body to make the adjustment. The increase in performance was .... well I am still running doubles at 59.

Can anyone think of any elite runner who doesnt run doubles? Jack Foster comes to mind but I cant think of anyone else. Its pretty much universal.

Congrats on your improvement, but seriously a half mile? I dont know if I'd even count that as a double. For me I wouldnt bother changing clothes and such unless I was doing 3-4 miles.

I think it was a link in the Hadd thread recently or maybe even the Hadd.pdf(think so), that gave results from testing mice that ran at lowe(er) intensities across different time period/durations. I think it found the longer the mice ran continuously each day the more mitchondria were developed in the legs of the mice blah blah blah...

Was wondering if the same effects could be achieved by running for the SAME amount of time a day but in 2 runs instead of 1 continuous run.? Assuming intensity stays the same. Could this be what's going on here with doubling?

And any doubling that simply adds on to current running for a day is simply more mileage...and more fitness usually comes from that.

Have never done them as I'm injury prone and older now but I really want to find a way to be able to do them to see if I can benefit.

In grad school (for phys ed) I remember reading a study that found two training sessions/day were superior to one, and this was true across many sports (not just running).

The same study found no added benefit for triples vis-a-vis doubles, however (but triples were still superior to singles).

Isn't this sort of what Malmo (see: Summer of Malmo) has been advocating for a lot of years now?

There were a few studies that have looked at doing doubles every other day (3 days a week) vs singles every day (six days a week). Volume and "pace" exactly the same.

In the first study I read (this is all from memory) the participants were their own controls, using one leg (on some sort of cycle-like machine, I think more like a constant load "kicking" exercise ) as the "singles" (one workout a day) leg, and the other leg as the "doubles" (two workouts a day, every other day) leg. They did 60 min steady-state workouts once (singles leg) or twice (doubles leg) a day for ten weeks. At the end, the doubles leg had much greater endurance, and had a significantly larger increases in many enzymes and other related blood measurements that are known to increase with increased endurance, than the singles leg, despite the same exact volume and intensity exercise program. The researchers argued that this could be due to the "doubles" leg undertaking more workouts in a glycogen depleted state (second workout, participants did not eat between exercise session on doubles days), which led to a larger stimulus of glycogen re-synthesis (and the doubles leg did have larger resting glycogen stores). However, the extra off days could also have improve recovery .Very interesting study.

A few caveats:

* I think these were fairly untrained participants

* This was a bit of an unusual exercise they were doing

* One leg exercise is not something normally participated in, one always exercise both together for endurance exercise

* The final endurance test was a "test to exhaustion" at a predetermined level of effort (x% of vo2 max or something like that), and these types of test tend to create larger differences than true time trial efforts which are more relevant to the real world.

* most athletes would do doubles or singles every day, not doubles every other day

Despite all that, the results were indeed intriguing.

And later, with experienced cyclists, other researchers retested the same concept but using two groups, one who did 6 singles a week, and one group that did 3 double workout days a week. However, this time, they introduced interval training along with steady state efforts. This pushed up the overall intensity. In this case, a much more relevant, real world scenario, there was no significant difference between endurance of athletes at the end of the protocol. However, doubles athletes did have slightly better endurance, slightly higher glycogen stores, and some higher measurements of other metabolic indicators related to endurance. So the doubles protocol did produce some differences, and most which pointed to a potential endurance advantage, but the actual test to exhaustion did not produce significant results. Yet still interesting that 3 days a week (3 doubles that is) was just as good, if not better in ways, than a standard 6 singles. I am sure they have done other spins on this concept (in fact I know they have), but I need to look up results.

Lastly, I once saw a re-print on line of some Lasse Viren training: lots of doubles and even triples, which included many moderate-distance runs of 3-5 miles.

There have been threads here about that. It's a rarity, especially now with professionals who have the whole day to train.

Harald Norpoth was a once a day guy as was Bob Deines, going back some years. Jonathan Wyatt was a once a day guy. I have a friend who did 2:16 on one run a day in 1971. But doubles are, as you say, pretty universal.

Okay

I ran 1419 and 813 in college and then partied for 8-10 yrs pissing away my best year performance. I then woke up and realized running fast was something I wanted to try to do again. then we had kids so time was at a premium. i have no data to support my findings but as a 42 year old i am running faster than i did as a 28yr old, because i am running more.

as a mid twenties guy i could run 14 miles on a weekend day and then party all night and slog out 5 miles the next day at 6pm at 730 pace. now i may run 3 miles at 8am before a soccer game, 6 miles after runnign errands and then throw in 3 at night. then on sunday maybe 8 in the monrning at a quick pace and then 4 at night. the bottom line is that more miles seems to produce better results. i cringe when i see my training log from hs and college and see the 3-4mile days on dates before and after college/hs races.

it has been a bittersweet revelation..i like running faster but it hurts to know i squandered bulk of a decade when i should have been at my peak performance level.

I did exactly the same thing. Pissed away eight years after college, then started up again with two kids and a full-time job, running 30% more miles with 90% less time in the schedule to get it done.

I try not to think about what I could have done in my 20s with the same commitment. But, I rationalise that when I was in my 20s, I was an idiot who wouldn't have appreciated the process or the results the way my 30-something self does.

Add me to the list of people whose running has been elevated to a whole new level by adding doubles!

I started doing doubles regularly my sophomore year of college and had a big breakout season (I went from 16:00 to 15:15). Then I got hurt, didn't run for a year, and when I came back all my old training partners who I would do doubles with were gone, and I just went with my coach's training plan and did mostly singles for the next two years. I made it down to 15:05, a moderate improvement.

Then I missed another year. I was in 17:30 shape after a couple weeks, and after just three months of doubles and only kind of doing workouts I was back down to 15:25 on the roads. I'm still doing doubles and they're just making me super strong. I wish I had continued with doubles my last two years of college!

I would love to hear more about the process of doing this. Did you find it helped with durability as well?

I think some readers are missing the point of the half mile run. The focus is on getting out the door to make the run possible. It's about discipline. The OP then stops the run if he feels like crap and needs recovery instead, but at least he can't say laziness was ever a reason to miss a run.

Shoebacca wrote:

I think some readers are missing the point of the half mile run. The focus is on getting out the door to make the run possible. It's about discipline. The OP then stops the run if he feels like crap and needs recovery instead, but at least he can't say laziness was ever a reason to miss a run.

Exactly.

Did you do all your morning runs easy? Did you ever pick up the pace in the a.m. runs? What sis your overall training look like when you were in low 15 shape & running doubles? Thanks!

Thanks for asking!

My morning runs were always pretty easy, I'd say averaging 7:30. Sometimes they'd be as fast as 6:20 or so, but this was still always a very easy effort. Four or five miles was typical.

Overall training: Two workouts, sometimes three, plus a race and a long run. Those workouts would either be tempos or intervals. Typical tempo would be 4-6 miles, at 5:15 or 5:30 pace, with the last mile faster. Intervals vary more, of course, but usually 3-5 miles at around race pace, a little faster the shorter the total volume. Long run each Sunday 18-20 miles. That would be the only day I didn't double. Wednesday I would also try to get my volume pretty high, maybe doubling 6/12 or 7/13.

I always thought it was excessive when we did three workouts. Usually one was supposed to be 'easy', but rarely turned out that way. Many people may say that 20 milers every weekend is unnecessary for 5k, but I thought they really helped my strength. Of course perhaps that was more the total volume. And it was doubles that made this possible.

has anyone done their main run/workout in the morning and their shorter/easier run in the evening?

Yes. That's how I do all of my running, mostly due to work/family needs.