41 yr old runs 4:38 mile with "no running" training program

I ran a 4:45 a few months ago. The only "training" I've done in the last 3 years is riding my bike 2 miles a day for my commute to work. Half mile there half mile home for lunch, x2 in the afternoon. I'm 38 and I did run a 4:12 in college. My running since college has been minimal - 10 mpw tops. Usually 0 mpw. So this guys performance is not that surprising to me. What has kept me in shape is just I've never not exercised for long period of time my entire life. I done some sort of exercise nearly daily since I was a kid.

the more of this i read, the more i wanna to stop doing distance runs. i'd rather be in the weight room or running sprints.

anyone who calls this guy bs needs to look at all the other posts about running fast with little distance training. then tell me why i should be bored on the roads if there are better ways to get in shape?

1K

I'm ready to jump on this bandwagon!

Who cares what they call it, I'm all for trying to stay healthy and try to get back into competing.

Having run gazillions of miles throughout my youthful years the body ain't what it used to be. Only 1 knee surgery so far!

As debilitating as the surgery was, I suffer from calf heart attacks on a regular basis. This seems to be a common problem for us males in the 40 + age group.

If I can find an approach that lets me run some races here and there and stay healthy, I'm in.

just joined his no running group on facebook. i wanna see what this is all about.

XXX_NYC wrote:

He said he does "no running" in his training, but his program consisted of 45 minutes of 50-200m sprints. How is that not running?

Sounds like a speed endurance program to me.

But neither Wariner nor Spearmon could run a 4:30 mile, right, distance guys?

Yeah, right.

Coach Carnegie wrote:

He said he does "no running" in his training, but his program consisted of 45 minutes of 50-200m sprints. How is that not running?

Sounds like a speed endurance program to me.

I understand the concept they are attempting to sell, but I agree with Coach, calling 45 minutes of 50-200m sprints "no running" begs credibility.

Seb coe couldn't break 12.0 from blocks.

"calling 45 minutes of 50-200m sprints "no running" begs credibility."

I read some of the stuff on his Facebook page and it doesn't look like he's trying to sell this as a non-running program. He describes it the concept as being focused on everything besides distance running and speed work.

He has a point. A lot of people just do distance and "longer" (over 200M) intervals. A lot more just do distance. Most people the post on Letsrun know that there's a lot more to reaching one's full potential than distance and long intervals, but most people in the general population don't.

that's bs. coe could break 12 coming out of a recliner.

so what's the verdict? hypothetically, if you were running the 800 and had to do the same 7 day routine every week, what would it be?

The 800 can be run at a decent level on very low mileage. I normally train my 800 women off of a 35-45 mile/week base, more if they run the 1500, but in one instance I had a runner who was a former top D2 runner (2nd @ nationals her last race) who had taken a several year break. She ran 2:08 after eight years of HS/college with mileage up to 40 mpw.

With me she was unwilling to run more than twice, occasionally three times week, 10-15 miles/week. After seven weeks I had her running 2:17, and she finished the season at 2:10, as good as all but her senior year, this off of one solid track session ad one 5-7 mile easy/tempo run/week. She probably could have even broken 5:00 for the mile, which would have been a PR. The caveat was that she was a fast-twitch runner coming from an early sprint backround (55 for 400).

I do a ton of cross-training personally, but I feel that for long-term development and enjoyment, one has to put in the miles as well, at some point in the cycle. I have tried lower mileage and had good results (near-PR of of 25-30 miles) in the 800, and it was refreshing, but I always go back to base-building as I want to sustain a higher level for decades to come.

Great story, coach.

Hey did anyone else see this Runner's World article? Looks like a semi-endorsement of this guy's training regimen...

http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-238-263-266-14192-0,00.html

That's depressing, since I can't break 5 at 44 and have run 45-80 miles per week for the last 3 years and my goal is 4:30.

How much do you weigh? Does he mention his body weight?

IMO the real question is would untalented master's runners be better off training like 800 runners first, or beginning with a big base?

Just seems like I can't recover doing relatively high mileage and two hard workouts a week. It's more of an either or at this age.

Not sure if it's the ideal overall workout or not, but clearly spending a day doing say 10X200 meters at 30 seconds each with a minute rest between each (or whatever similar # of seconds one is capable of) goes a lot further in developing you for the mile than would spending that same day going out and jogging 5 miles in 32-33 minutes.

Just because I can run a 4:45 at 38 on nearly no running doesn't mean I'm satisfied with that or feel competitive or feel even close to fulfilling my running potential is no where near the truth. If I didn't have work and family obligations and running was a big priority in my life, I'd be doing high mileage training like I did in college that gave me my PR of 4:12. Because I've lived a healthy lifestyle since college, my drop off doesn't seem too dramatic. But what I'm doing now will not aid me in getting faster. I will continue to get slower unless I start focused training(more mileage being focus #1). I'm different from the guy in the article too in that I'm haven't done any training with the goal of running faster, and this guy was doing non running exercise with the goal of running a faster mile.

u had me at the pic

rrrrrrrraaaaaaarrrrr

can you draw connections to this and Mihaly Igloi / Bob Schul type training?

repeated sprints/strides with standing or walking recovery over and over and over again?

Junk Master wrote:

That's depressing, since I can't break 5 at 44 and have run 45-80 miles per week for the last 3 years and my goal is 4:30.

How much do you weigh? Does he mention his body weight?

IMO the real question is would untalented master's runners be better off training like 800 runners first, or beginning with a big base?

Just seems like I can't recover doing relatively high mileage and two hard workouts a week. It's more of an either or at this age.

Well yes, you'd be best off beginning with a big base i.e. tens of thousands of lifetime training miles. Just like the article author.

Hi,

I'm the 41-year old in question. Flattered to have sparked a little conversation.

If I can chime in, my self-experiment was meant illustrate some things I learned while making an 800M comeback. It was meant to be my athletic "last hurrah", so I wanted to do everything as perfectly as possible. I carefully logged everything I did during a 900 day period (where I did some sort of training every day). I also did about 2,000 hours of research -- Internet, books, coaches, top U.S. athletes etc.

Of course, that doesn't make me a guru, so take what I say as points for discussion, not debate.

The yin-yang graphic in my write-up (http://tinyurl.com/7kara2x) summed it up nicely. Basically, I ran a lot faster (or equally well with less effort) when I focused on speed/strength versus endurance.

They say the 800M is 60% aerobic (pick your number), which suggests that 60% of one's training should be focused on aerobic conditioning. There are two things wrong with that:

1. They also say the 200M is 28% aerobic. Again, pick your number, but how many 200M runners spend 28% of their time on aerobic training? I don't know many that spend ANY time on aerobic conditioning (unless they also do the 400M).

Thus, as someone suggested in an earlier post -- knowing aerobic/anaerobic splits is USELESS unless you know how to use that information. This brings me to point #2.

2. EVERY activity has some sort of aerobic component to it. Therefore, even a 400M runner who does zero distance work is gaining some level of aerobic conditioning via track workouts, circuit training, etc. Basically, anything that gets the breathing up.

If we use the 200M runner as the baseline, we can make a hypothetical assumption that you can subtract 28% (let's round up to an even 30%) from the aerobic/anaerobic equations to determine how much time one should dedicate to the development of each system.

For the 800M, that changes the split to 30/70.

Thus, when my training exhibited more of a 60/40 split, I was theoretically spending 30% too much time on aerobic activities (and 30% too little on the rest). My resultant times were generally in the 2:00 range.

On the flip side, my recent training has exhibited a 0/100 split, which is 30% light on the aerobic side. Again, my resultant time was 2:00.

Is it a coincidence that my time was he same when my aerobic training was hypothetically 30% too much and 30% too little?

Incidentally, in the final months before running my 40+ PR of 1:56.20 my training was consistent with the adjusted 30/70 split I mentioned above.

Of course, being an "old man", doing so much strength/speed training didn't leave room for running distance. My body simply couldn't recover fast enough. As a result, I started doing almost all of my endurance work on an elliptical machine.

Thus, the term "NO RUNNING" was born. Sensationalist? Sure, but if it helps one kid to run a faster PR...or an old man like me to run 1:59 one last time, who will complain?

There's a LOT more to it than I can discuss here, but feel free to ask questions (or heckle me) here. If you leave a comment under the FasterThanForty article (http://tinyurl.com/7kara2x), I'll answer more quickly, since I get email notifications there.

Cheers,

Mark Gomes