no interval work success?

There isn't something like the world's best coach.

Just because he wrote a book and get exposed a lot in RW.

"the world's best coach" is just a trick by RW to get more readers, everybody want to read what "world's best coach" has to say.

I would be careful about becoming too involved with heart rate monitoring. In Steve Moneghetti's book 'In the Long Run' he lists a number of negative factors in using the heart rate monitor and I have to agree with them.

I think they can be a great physical and mental tool but not always, every day is different and every run is different. In the Lasse Viren video 'Running is Your Life' he talks about running very high mileage in Columbia between 72 and 76, often 200 miles per week, a lot of this was done with a heart rate in the 120's, very very slow, and he would run progressively slower if his rate continued to rise.

I have had days when physically I was having a good day but mentally my day had been problematic and this was reflected in my workouts. I think the heart rate monitor is a good tool but I would not base all of my training around the inormation it provides me with. Of course everybody is different....

Some of the posts on heer are truly inspiring...

If you ever carry out a full four-five phase plan of Dr. Daniels training you will quickly realize that it has nothing to do with the RW mentality.

Its hard work, but it works!

Just another potential example. I'm only going to be a senior in High School this coming fall, but I've noticed i seem to improve alot from just doing easy mileage, LT intervals, and using races as my interval / speed sessions.

Examples would be I started running my freshman year and I wasn't really into running that much but ran around 5:00 in the mile and 11:00 in the 2 mile.

Next year I did the same but improved to 4:49 and 10:30.

Got more serious the summer before junior year (this year) and was in my best shape probably, but I got an achilles injury that kept me out from the start of the XC season all the way until about 6 weeks from the State meet. WHen I came back all I did was easy easy short distance runs (like nothing faster than 8:00 pace), LT intervals (like 6:00 pace for 1k repeats with 45 sec rest), and used dual meets as my speed workouts and basically raced myself into shape. By the end of the seaon I was running 16:50-17:00 for the championship meets after being injured for about 6 weeks and then only have 6 weeks to get back. I did do pool running to keep fitness along with swimming, but not that much.

Then for indoors I started adding in more traditional speed sessions and got hurt again. Missed all of indoor track again and kept fitness with swimming and pool running.

I made it back for the spring season and again all I did was easy short distance runs (like 4-6 miles at most), LT reps, and used races as speedier sessions to get myself into shape. Basically I raced myself into shape off of about 25-30 miles per week. That was about it. I got my 800 meter down to 2:05, mile down to 4:38, and two mile down to 10:20.

Seems to me like I might be one of those guys that faster reps don't help out too much. I also noticed that when I followed this plan and used races as a way of "racing" myself into shape it felt like every race I was getting stronger and the problem was that I was running out of races and distance to race. Every race I finished I immediantly though I had more left that I did really expect to be there.

Hope that makes sense.

In The Long Run...where can I get a copy of this book? Have been searching multiple sites and locations? Any suggestions.

how can i do this, i have no clue on what i can run right now for 5k

Emmanuel:Do a time trial at a shorter distance and estimate what you can do for the 5k distance. I recommend that you do a 2400m time trial (6 laps on the outdoor track) at full effort over very close. Email to me your time and I will tell you what you likely would have run in a full 5k distance. Then, you can train according to your current 5k race pace or at least use it as your reference guidline. runfastcoach@gmail.com

emmanuel wrote:

how can i do this, i have no clue on what i can run right now for 5k

I haven't read this whole thread so someone might have covered this already, but I get the feeling that a lot of the claims made by successful runners about succeeding on X amount of mileage are oversimplified or often cases of revisionist thinking rather than something closely resembling the intensity of work actually done.

The example of Mark Nenow came up recently, and his training method has been boiled down to 'run 13 times a week, 10 am, 10pm, 20 Sunday'. If a 33 min. guy reads this and thinks...damn...if I do that I'll run 27:20, he's sorely mistaken. What we're not seeing is the buildup, the racing schedules (read speedwork), the intensities of those 'steady runs' (in Nenow's case I think a lot of that running on hills at sub-5 pace counts as interval work same as if they were run on a track) and a myriad of other training elements which mask the true complexity of an apparently 'simple' formula.

We often hear about people running nothing but mileage for 3 months and running a PB, but what we often don't hear about is the work leading up to that. I ran a pretty good 10K one fall off nothing but basework for 2 months. I figured that basework might have been better for my running until my coach pointed out the intensity of the track work that I'd done in July and August. To conclude that mere mileage was my key to success would have been wrong.

I really believe that 99% of the people who claim to find no success in a structured program like Daniels', where reps and intervals are heavily utilised, are probably not really doing it correctly. I used to see it in university all the time - people running their intervals too fast, or not doing enough miles, or time-trialing the long run route etc.

There's a reason why runners move up in race distances over time. It's because the speed and fitness gained from the middle distances help in the longer distances. Is it any wonder that Dieter Baumann, Ali Said-Sief and the like have 3:30 1500 speed to their credit?

If all these high-mileage-as-the-road-to-fitness people are right, why aren't marathoners winning 10ks? It's always the other way around...

I can"t do this in my base training period, it will mess up my whole base

Doing a 2400m time trial will not mess up your base. I think you don't really grasp what "base" means. It doesn't have to be about doing strictly distance running. As long as you aren't running too many fast workouts or races as you do your foundation training (base), you will be fine. Many elite runners around the world do some quality throughout the year, but they push it even harder and longer during certain periods closer to key races.

Take a look at the Ehtiopian runners. To a large degree, they include intervals or reps in their schedules throught the year. Dr. Kostre, their coach, schedules more hill reps or longer reps like 2ks instead of 1ks during the off-season, but they never get rid of quality. The Portugese do intervals, reps, and races nearly year-round. De Castella, Moneghetti, and Troup have done quality year round, but not to excess or too frequently. Frank Shorter, America's Olympic gold medalist in the marathon who was very good at the 10k and cross-country did reps year-round and so did Prefontaine and all the runners from the Univeristy of Oregon like Salazar, Chapa, Centrowitz, McChesny, Clary, Kvalheim, Geist, etc.

You may find that including even 1 mile reps at about 15k-20k race pace (9-12 miles) can be a valuable element of your generalized preparation (base).

If you are a younger person, you might not know who Steve Ovett is. He was one of the best milers in the world (record holder more than once) and Olympic 800m champ in 1980. Nearly every week of the year for 15 years he ran either 1000m or 1 mile reps around a park that included hills. He ran 1:44 for 800, 3:30 for 1500, 3:48 for the mile, good 3k and 5k times and even elite 1/2 marathon times. He was tough in x-country and won numerous European titles. Ever heard of Seb Coe or David Moorcroft? Same thing...some quality year-round.

motoqw wrote:

Daniel's does the speed work first, during high mileage periods such as the summer.

The REPS that Daniel's refers to are mile race pace. They are usually done first to prepare the body for the biomechanical stress component of aerobic intervals.

This seems backwards to most people, but it makes a lot of sense if one is injury prone.

JTupper believes that one should learn skill and coordination before long-hard running.

So what i will do is that i will have to run doubles that day in order to maintain my mileage. When i am about to do it i will let you know. thank u

Running speed work during your base period will not mess up your base.

Most distance runners believe this.

It is a myth, plain and simple.

Jack Daniels prescribes the most intense speed work(mile pace), with full recovery, smack dab in the middle of the highest mileage. It works great.

emmanuel wrote:

So what i will do is that i will have to run doubles that day in order to maintain my mileage. When i am about to do it i will let you know. thank u

Don't get so hung up on your mileage for any one particular day. I'm assuming that the ultimate goal is to run faster, not put impressive numbers into a training log.

I track miles over a period of time, say 4 weeks. I might have a goal of 200 miles (to make the numbers simple) over 4 weeks. Although that's an average of 50 miles/week, I might have weeks of 50, 45, 52, 53 to get there. That way, if one day is low due to illness, fatigue, life event, or a time-trial/race, your whole week isn't screwed up. I used to be on that mileage train to the point where I did a 10-mile run the day before an important meet just to make sure I got my 70 mpw in.

I'd look at the time-trial as a "break" from the normal training and a chance to do something a little different. Just add a couple of miles to the normal cooldown, and you'll be fine.

You've made some good points here and I'm not really arguing, but I think there are different ways to look at some of the examples you've brought up.

There are people who do a lot of anaerobic training first and then improve after switching to a volume based approach. One way to look at this is the way you're sugesting, that the faster work set up the success as much as the mileage did. But another way to look at it is that the anaerobic work didn't work and the volume did. That's essentially Nenow's history.

Then there are guys like Bill Adcocks who ran very well without ever doing much repetition work. What do we make of people like that? We could always fall back on the old "think what he'd have done if he'd worked on his speed" argument, and maybe he'd have been faster. But you can say that about anyone regardless of what they did.

I know that Hadd once touched on the question of why different people did better on one kind of training while others didn't do well on the same sort of work. He thinks it comes down to the sorts of muscle fibers you've got. Someone with a high percentage of fast twitch fibers will likely respond well to faster running, but someone with a high percentage of slow twitch fibers will not respond to that sort of training very well simply because fast training stimulates fast twitch fibers and a person with few such fibers who's doing fast training is training something that isn't there. (I'm only paraphrasing Hadd here. I don't claim to know much about physiology.) But this could explain why you don't find marathoners winning 10ks too often.

HRE wrote:

I know that Hadd once touched on the question of why different people did better on one kind of training while others didn't do well on the same sort of work. He thinks it comes down to the sorts of muscle fibers you've got. Someone with a high percentage of fast twitch fibers will likely respond well to faster running, but someone with a high percentage of slow twitch fibers will not respond to that sort of training very well simply because fast training stimulates fast twitch fibers and a person with few such fibers who's doing fast training is training something that isn't there.

Or rather, overtraining the small amount which is there.

Yes. Much better stated than I did.

bump

Indeed, responses to training can be attributed to muscle fiber characteristics as well as genetic adaptability. A sprinter won't respond to distance runs at slow paces the same as a distance runner and vice versa.