LateRunnerPhil - Peaking with Tinman Training for a 5k PR (6 weeks) / Training Log

Hdhdhddh wrote:

Are you currently/have you been coached by Tinman?

Didn't you know? He is Tinman, lol

Hdhdhddh wrote:

Are you currently/have you been coached by Tinman?

No but I have studied his forum for many months and watched all his videos and interviews. He always openly shared information (except race tactics) with everyone. I did some lactate testing with a local coach whose system is very similar. According to him, in thousands of tests he has never seen such a big improvement in lactate threshold in 15 months (from 4:11/k to 3:26/k). That's 4 mmol threshold which he perceives as 10k pace with his method of measurement (blood from ear, and sending blood samples to a lab instead of using a portable lactate tester).

Week 1a update

Monday

AM: 14 mile long run on roads, pace 7:00/mi. 85F/29C and sun (no clouds) made this extremely tough. Normally I do every long run on hilly trails, but wanted to check my performance. Legs and breathing was very fine, but I lost a lot of electrolytes, salt, water and burned all my sugar (in heat we burn a lot more carbs/sugar!).

PM: Planned 1.5k swim, but after 1k I was toast. Completely out of energy/fuel/carbs. Tested a 50m dive without breathing, only got to 37.5m.

Tuesday

AM: 3 mile recovery run, 7:50/mi pace. This was supposed to be a 8 mile run with hill sprints, but I still had ZERO energy/carbs. Couldn't get HR above 120. Didn't sleep well and was not recovered from the long run. Once I'm out of carbs, it takes 2-3 days to get back up again. I started eating a LOT of carbs.

PM: 8 mile easy run on hilly trails & 9x10s hill sprints, 7:40/mi pace. Started like morning run - 120 HR max, and wanted to cancel after 2 miles. Then I decided to run up a mountain, and finally was able to get HR up in the 140s and strong breathing. I was very fast despite low HR. Rest of run was good, and hill sprints were great.

Wednesday

AM: 5 mile recovery run, hilly trails, 7:30/mi. Felt fantastic during that run. Tinman recommends to double on workout days, and do the double in the morning to make the afternoon workout better.

PM: 10 mile CV workout - 6x1k in 3:17-3:18-3:18-3:18-3:16-3:13 and 6x200 in 30. Started the first 1k and 200 too hard, but it was fine at the 1k's. The 200 was supposed to start at 33 but I had tailwind and got rolling. Also wanted to impress the javelin throwers on the track I guess.. Still, the 200s kept being very easy and relaxed. After 4 I thought about quitting but then reminded myself I posted my plan here of 6x200 and kept going. All good! This was the best CV workout I've done, in general I'm improving each week by 2-4 sec on the CV reps.

Great start of training this week. Side note: I lost 5 kg (~11 lbs) in the last 1-2 weeks, the majority being lost in the first 3 days with a heavy diet. All my paces increased, and I kept the speed. I'm an extreme ectomorph/small framed runner, but had a lot of fat since I was overeating a lot. After I saw how little Nick Symmonds was eating during his pro career I realized I had to change my diet, made it a lot more healthy and it's showing benefits and getting me to my ideal runner weight.

B trainer wrote:

Hdhdhddh wrote:

Are you currently/have you been coached by Tinman?

Didn't you know? He is Tinman, lol

I know this is a mistake, and I don't recommend to anyone to share your identity on letsrun, but here is my Strava profile:

Wish I had known a better way to prove that I'm not Tinman posting on these forums with a ghost name, as I'm one of the biggest proponents of his training (because it worked extremely well on me and my progression as runner is primarily due to his training system).

Well, at least those with a Strava account and interested in my Tinman/CV training can follow.

I see something that you maybe don't see? It looks you can run 400m all out at least in 60 sec, and then your 17:18 5k PB is really nothing special. I think you overestimate Tinman's CV approach and I just say it's a pace there is no need for. With another coach and training system you could run much faster. I'm sure!

I don't doubt your sincerity, enthusiasm nor the extent of time and effort you've spent studying the Tinman approach, but there is something very Trump-esque about someone holding himself out as a Tinman expert who has never actually worked with Tom. :-) As someone who actually has worked with Tom for more than 7 years with a few breaks, I can say that you seem to more or less have captured the general principles but are not totally on the mark. But that's good enough to improve and run well, so good for you. Interestingly, Tom's training has changed somewhat over the years. At least it has for me, and I suspect for others too based on having listened to some of his interviews. Nowadays I'm getting a lot of 3-pace workouts with CV or threshold reps, hill repeats and then some fast strides (800m pace), which wasn't true 7 years ago. One thing that you seem to have slightly wrong is the CV workouts: (a) it looks like your CV reps are way too fast (not sure how you're getting 3:20 per 1km if you're a high 16's 5km runner, and CV pace is not aspirational but is based on that day's fitness, so is meant to be even slower than a recent race time) , and (b) he never has "longer/walking" recoveries in a CV workout. The standard recovery is a 200m jog in roughly 1:00-1:15.

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

Hdhdhddh wrote:

Are you currently/have you been coached by Tinman?

No but I have studied his forum for many months and watched all his videos and interviews.

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

I know this is a mistake, and I don't recommend to anyone to share your identity on letsrun...

Wish I had known a better way to prove that I'm not Tinman posting on these forums with a ghost name...

Sucked in by a troll lol.

Basic rookie error.

Your paces for workouts don't match his calculator. A 3:20k is a 5:20 1600m which is well under your most recent race performance. CV workouts are at closer to 10k pace (on the SLOW side of 5k) and not at faster than 5k. 3:20 is the CV pace for someone who has already run 15:55.

Additionally, 6:00 pace is faster than his calculator. That is 16:15 current 5k fitness in a race to get that for a tempo pace.

It does seem odd that the one feature(CV) that most associate with Tinman is the one you have totally wrong.

Isn't it supposed to be something like 12k pace? You meanwhile are going faster than VO2 max pace it seems judging by your 5k time.

The Floyd,

What distances are you training for under Tom?

The Floyd is Tom.

AKA Tom. wrote:

The Floyd is Tom.

If you knew how Tom wrote things out you would know that is incorrect.

Funny, and true. I'm maybe a little wordy in my writing style and Tom is definitely not! I'm sure someone could find enough posts on here under my registered name to figure out that I've posted on all kinds of stuff that Tom clearly wouldn't care about. To the guy who asked what I train for, typically 5-10km. I'm not one of Tom's stars by any means though I'm a decent-enough runner. But I'm also not going to take over from LateRunnerPhil as the "Tinman" expert on this or another thread. Phil is right that there is plenty of material out there about how Tom approaches training.

wrongwrong wrote:

AKA Tom. wrote:

The Floyd is Tom.

If you knew how Tom wrote things out you would know that is incorrect.

The Floyd wrote:

Nowadays I'm getting a lot of 3-pace workouts with CV or threshold reps, hill repeats and then some fast strides (800m pace), which wasn't true 7 years ago.

One thing that you seem to have slightly wrong is the CV workouts: (a) it looks like your CV reps are way too fast (not sure how you're getting 3:20 per 1km if you're a high 16's 5km runner, and CV pace is not aspirational but is based on that day's fitness, so is meant to be even slower than a recent race time) , and (b) he never has "longer/walking" recoveries in a CV workout. The standard recovery is a 200m jog in roughly 1:00-1:15.

To you and the others who posted similar things, that's a valid point. I run the CV sessions based on effort. I've done like 50 sessions in the past year. all with k-repeats and faster stuff added after. Tinman recommends CV reps at 90-94% of max HR, which for me is 165-172. HR has many problems, sometimes my max is much lower and heat, stress, glycogen stores, humidity, hormones, hydration all affect it so I rather run with perceived effort.

Here is a list of almost 50 CV workouts I did, week after week since July 2018:

For each workout (all of them done on a track) I track HR and pace. Then, I created a value called "CV points" which is a combination of HR and pace, the lower the better.

You can see in the graph how my fitness evolved over time - there is a trendline sloping downward, which shows improvement after time. There are two significant spikes where I got unfit, both of these were after I took 2 weeks off completely because I had to do so much uni stuff. I did not leave my house in both of these periods, and when I started running again it took around 2 months each time just to get back to the level I was before.

5-8 weeks ago, after my break I did CV intervals of 4 reps, in ~3:40/k.

3-4 weeks ago, I did 5 reps in ~3:30/k.

1-2 weeks ago, I did 6 reps in ~3:19/k.

All at roughly same effort. The thing with Tinman training is that if you keep HR and perceived effort the same week after week, the times just get faster. There is nothing you can do about it, it's the body's adaptation to Tinman training. That's why I don't need to change the workouts yet, I'm not doing the same every week - I'm doing the same reps and effort every week, but the pace is faster each week which is a new stimulus. All of that is just supplemented by easy mileage, weekly tempo, weekly long run and striders/hill sprints. I don't need VO2MAX intervals to improve, in fact last times I did them I burned out and my performance declined. I'm not ready yet to do large volumes of VO2MAX intervals and absorb/benefit from them like elites can. I am however possible to get my CV pace down to 3:05-3:10/k, which would be a nice foundation for harder running.

Maybe the CV intervals are a bit too fast, but I'm not straining with them and improving - so just right for me. Tinman would have me do a 2400m time trial once every 4 weeks to adjust paces, but it's currently summer and I'm a terrible heat runner (very tall and heavy) so it's just useless information since conditions can go from 85F and more with sun to 70F and clouds which is a huge difference.

Lastly, the walking breaks were after the 2 week off where I had super low blood volume and was unfit. Also, it was scorching hot some days with temperatures in the 90s. Tinman actually recommends to run a more specific pace in hot conditions and use walk breaks and re-hydrate between reps. He was also a very bad heat runner himself. I even broke up Tinman tempos during that period to 1-2 mile repeats at Tinman tempo with short breaks to hydrate/rest. In the beginning of my summer training I struggled with 6:30/mi for a Tinman tempo and had to break it up, now I can run at easy effort at that pace - that's how much I improved.

You must be terrible at racing then.

way too fast for CV wrote:

You must be terrible at racing then.

He trains too hard.

it looks like wrote:

way too fast for CV wrote:

You must be terrible at racing then.

He trains too hard.

Since the training pace has nothing to do with Tinman and the exact specifications, the thread should be renamed. I suggest: "Peaking with balls to the wall effort for a 5k PR (6 weeks)? Training Log"

What about yellow? Can the Tinman run with you on the Yellow Brick Road so you can go to visit the Wizard of Oz to get some magic potion of EPO?

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

Hey,

there has been a lot of buzz of Tinman training on the boards recently.

And a lot of it from you. An obsessive amount.

Are you talking about during racing season, or does this general schedule with CV, tempo, and long run apply to year-round training?