Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

I suggest going to the group on Strava. There's a lot of good information there, including a pacing spreadsheet, and a better chance your question will get answered by those that have been utilizing the practices here. Somewhere in the group posts, too, someone has distilled down the thread into a couple of different, searchable, PDFs. Look for "Norwegian Singles Approach" in Strava Groups. Good luck!

This is a fantastic thread and I have ton of respect for Sirpoc and all his contributions. The 3 sub t a week approach works great for him and it sounds like a bunch of you too. I do think however, there is still room to experiment and what works well for others may not work as well for someone else. I notice a lot of pushback from the group when someone floats the idea of doing the hills as a third workout instead of 3 sub t method sirpoc made popular. I for one am doing the X factor hills session rather than an additional sub t. I’ve experimented with both, and my results have been greater with the hills. Long runs are generally frowned upon (at least in the traditional sense) but I think there is still a huge benefit for those racing longer distances to go more than 75-90 minutes. I think using the long run with sub-t mixed in as the third session has benefits too.

im not trying to derail the thread and I guess my point is we can still experiment with this method rather than follow the letter of the law that was unofficially established somewhere down the line. The sub t focus is still the most important, but there is opportunity for new ideas!

In all due fairness, on the Strava group there has been a whole amount of different tweaks and approaches, especially for the marathon. I think in general though still a lot of the success has been down to sticking pretty close to the classic format laid out here mainly because it probably keeps you on the low end of risk. I think sirpoc himself has said that it he stopped improving, he would likely take more risks. But if he's still improving. Why change it? He does also do a pretty "long" run now, relative to what was talked about before. On the Strava group i think he said this is the most efficient way of increasing load that he currently has available.

Spot on. I've noticed the same. I think the general format is amazing and I've certainly improved but there is absolutely always room for individualisation. Take for instance, Sirpoc advocates doing no drills/strides and running straight in. For someone like myself, with my awkward, uncoordinated little shuffle, I'd absolutely be doing myself a disservice by not prioritising drills/strides for some easy efficiency gains.

I agree with this. Also consider Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen is:

1. Faster than sirpoc and he does hills now.

2. Has access to the best training methods and does hills now.

No disrespect to sirpoc but I'm going to copy the hobby jogger who is faster and has access to more training knowledge.

Bit of a weird post this one. The facts are sirpoc is faster than KI over every distance. This has been said a few times as some sort of knock, when it's not even factually coreect.

He's a minute faster in the HM already and KI ran his on the fast Barcelona course , versus sirpoc running a minute faster on a absolutely stacked with hills course that included by the looks of it sections of grass and trails (not to mention the 1000 feet of climbing). It's at the point where let's be honest he would be about a KM ahead at least of KI on the same course. So a huge margin.

That's not to knock KI, but I think people totally underestimate how impressive and good sirpoc has got. Just because he is new to the sport he's not new to understanding training and what works.

He probably has put a basic program together that would get most people closer to their potential than 90% of coaches who you have to pay for. I honestly don't think that's an exaggeration at this point. Obviously the closer you get to your potential or when the gains stop , the tweaks you might add in are to ice the cake.

This is a hobby jogging programm.

25% LT Reps 400-3k 30-2' rest

75% Easy running

Racing frequently

Nobody stops you from adding strides, weights, hills, vo2 max, fast lon runs , but the question is can you maintain that for 3-6 months ?

Better less load per week but every week for 6 month then more load but inconsistant.

That's certainly one way to say "copied Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen". How quickly we forget our roots.

For a more marathon focused approach - Would it be of any value to modify one of the 3 weekly Q sessions away from Sub-T into a MLR (15 miles) of MP+10%?
For me that gives a higher TSS and I am quite certain I'd be able to fit that in without being too fatigued.

I don’t think you grasp what “quite certain” means. If you’re highly confident and have others’ blessing, though, give it a shot.

To be fair to sirpoc. 1. He is not claiming anything I don't think? I've spoken to him a number of times and seems like a humble guy? 2. He would have every right to claim he was doing this way before KI. I have started cycling and seeked some advice from him (for free as he's not here to sell anything) and he shared his training logs from me from 2014-2017 and he was training exactly like this. When I say exactly, massive blocks of absolutely identical to this with 3x easy, 3x sub threshold / sweetspot @ 2*15 or 3*20 and 1 really long ride. The only diffence being the extra volume on the bike. He just fell into the Daniel's marketing trap like we all have when you Google running programs and then quickly realised time to revert back to old methods.

Maybe the Kristoffer was a fan of the British time trial scene. Of course I jest, if you speak to sirpoc he lifted the methods he told me from fellow cyclists, who lifted it from a swim coach, who lifted it from speed skaters, who likely lifted it from Norwegian cross coutnry skiers. The point being, there is nothing original here. This isn't a new method but I think we can all agree it has been one of the most well thought and laid out threads in LRC we have had. I appreciate it and I am faster and more knowledgeable because of it.

Just my thoughts. Thanks guys!

Sweet spot in cycling was a thing a long time before 2014, sirpoc hardly invented this style of training. And before sweetspot there was lydiard and his ‘time trials’.

During Paris Olympics tv commentary, Michael Phelps stated his 'red' training HR was 26 for 10" count. In US many swim coaches us a color system for training zones, clear, white, pink, red, blue, purple. with red as threshold. This means his coach Bob Bowman was using a sub threshold method for his freestyle endurance sets, as most swim coaches would consider 26 HR as 'pink.'

My teenage athletes made the most improvement when training sub threshold. What I find wonderful about this thread is it is the first extended discussion of this effort level of endurance training that I've found. I've read the whole thing.

In my own swimming, in my 70s, I find managing adaptive energy and cns fatigue are the trickiest elements to get right for consistency of training.

I think I would mostly agree with this assessment. I don't think sirpoc84 has claimed anywhere to invent anything. This thread was obviously incredibly well detailed, thought out etc that it has grown into something pretty big. What is most impressive I think is how we have been able to follow it in relatively idiot proof steps. Also, it's been great to see others apply it now the thread is plenty old and how much success. I don't think it matters where or when this style of training started.

What I will say about sirpoc is how impressive it is he really does scrape every last ounce of performance he can put of what he does. If you see and read into the posts on Strava, he clearly has talent but I doubt there is any hobby joggers out there who has got as near to the maximum ability you can, on hours available as he has, when you consider the god given talent. Also the mental will power to just continue to slowly chip away by doing the same thing over and over.

I don't think he posts here anymore but the indication is he will run the London marathon next year from Strava. Then it will be really interesting to have followed this method through from what started out as a park run hobby jogger level through to championship London race entry.

As others have said above. Fantastic to have this thread to engage in fantastic sharing of ideas. Would highly recommend anyone who is not already at using the Strava group as well where some incredibly useful and thoughtful stuff is getting posted as a spin off from this insightful thread.

I think you may need to tweak more than one session a week for a successful marathon build. I think the sub M pace run, around LT1, would be a very beneficial pace to include in marathon training, as the fatigue mechanisms at LT1 are closer to what you'll experience on race day than the sub LT2 training with this method. All the norweigian style marathon programs I've seen have had at least 1 LT1 workout a week. I've experiemented with this in my training and I agree with you that you can get crazy high TSS with LT1 work with very little fatigue. LT1 allows for more clustering (quality days back to back) or longer sessions like you suggested.

Yesterday it hit me when I was reading an article about all the Ingies and the origins of their training. We keep saying that this type of training has the major benefit of being easier on the body? While using the brothers as an example of it's merits? We also know that Jacob is coming off major injury, and much more ironically, we know that his 2 brothers (who were much more elite than we remember) literally were limited throughout their career by a plague of injuries. Ironic, 2 guys known for injuries are the example of how easy this is on the body? And now JI with a major injury?

It's just 3 dudes but I don't know that we know that running comfortably hard and sprinting up hills for hours on end is necessarily easier. 10 x 400 at mile pace is harder on you than 10x400 at threshold. But not sure that extends to 25 x 400 at threshold multiple times.

I don’t know that much about TSS, so I’d be interested to hear more about this. My understanding was that sirpoc settled on the schedule that he does because it was the best bang for your buck from a TSS perspective. It sounds like you can actually get TSS higher with LT1? I’m assuming that would require more time though? Or could you do something like 10 minutes warm-up/cool down, 40 minutes around LT1 and do that four or five times a week to get a higher TSS?

There was a good thread in Strava group of sirpoc and Hard2find discussing this. They actually concluded likely the actual best bang for buck might be Marathon pace 30 or so minutes every day. Or at least 5 days across a week. I think that was an in theory comment, rather than what you might actually do in real life. There's some interesting chat there. I don't believe in there being an exact science go it. But I came into this thread myself very old school and skeptical but have becoming a believer myself now that it is useful to quantify, plan and track running with some sort of overall stress score. It's certainly not perfect, but I think it's a very good starting point to play around with different scenarios and then find what is realistic.

In practice, for this 5-8 hour range, I'm still not sure there is a best bang for your buck than the original format proposed here a year ago.

The "bang for buck TSS" idea I think is secondary to the fact that Sirpoc had massive success cycling with 3 sub T. As others have said, this is actually fairly common training in cycling, so he had that as further validation to stick to it. Then, within that framework, he uses TSS along with how his workouts are going, to triangulate the shape he's in. Pretty smart. The TSS comparison of this vs Daniels was trying to objectively say that 3 sub T generates more load than than Daniels. I think you can also get a subjective feeling for this, that Vo2 workouts ask a lot of you and then you just can do as much during the rest of the week-- TSS is just a formal way to compare it.

Hard2Find had a great post earlier in the thread about the drawbacks of TSS. It is heavily biases volume over intensity. For example, 25 min at Interval, 32 min at Threshold and 53 min at Easy (all JD paces) generate 60 TSS according to Hard2Find's TSS calculator spreadsheet. The recovery needed for those workouts are ridiculously different. The take away is that TSS isn't everything, but it's a helpful metric to track consistency/ progress if you're already working within a logical training framework.

I suspect that what is optimal is highly individual, and that in the vast majority of cases good training that you do consistently will always beat spotty training that may be "ideal." To the posters above who say that those with success stick closely to Sirpoc's guidelines, my suspicion is that what's happening is that those people are more consistent than the people changing things up. If you create a plan that's similar but different from Sirpocs and you stick to it, you may get just as good of results. I think the reason is that the range of sub T paces/ durations is actually much broader than what Sirpoc does. But what Sirpoc works, so why change it?

I think if you're following a hard/ easy approach, what Sirpoc does is probably very close to ideal. Maybe if you're weaker on the endurance side 40-45 min worth of intervals at M pace may be better than 36 min at Sub T. But now we're splitting hairs, and its probably best to just get out and run.

If you're willing to break the hard/ easy approach, there are a lot of ways to generate more TSS in a week, like the 30 min at M a day that the poster above mentioned. I suspect that there will be greater variability with this kind of clustering, meaning some will do great and some will break, and the hard/ easy will probably be best for most people most of the time. But the ultimate question is, does this higher TSS convert to greater fitness and faster times? I've heard Sirpoc estimate that there may be about a 10-15% difference in performance based on how you generated your TSS. Say person A gets 60 CTL through lots of all easy running, person B through 3 sub T, and person C through a Daniels program. The variation in performance between those groups may be 10-15%, so TSS gets us in the right ballpark but isn't predictive. 3subT gets us the load with less time than plan A, and is more repeatable than plan C. I suspect the variation in performance is largely due to one's training history and general strengths/ weaknesses.

For example, my 5k time is much better than my 10k time which is much better than my HM time. I suspect for me, that more volume at the lower end of the sub T range is more beneficial than the shorter reps (400s, 1000s). Below is the schedule I've experimented with for 4 weeks. I just had a break due to Covid, and am torn between picking it back up or going to the traditional 3 sub T.

Monday- 1 hr with 8x 4 min LT2

Tuesday-1 hr with 45 min at LT1 (90% of M pace) 3x 15 min for example

Wednesday- 90 min easy

Thursday- 1 hr with 4 x 10 min at M pace and slightly quicker

Friday- 1 hr with 45 min at LT1 (90% of M pace)

Saturday- 1 hr easy

Sunday- 1 hr with 45 min at LT1 (90% of M pace)

My CTL shot up doing this vs 3 sub T. My experience is that the fatigue you get from LT1 work is completely different than the fatigue from LT2. One way to describe it is that running LT1 simulated high milage. It's still Z2 in 5 zone model work, but with 45 min at LT1 I felt like it was more like a 90 min easy run. Interestingly, this pace is about 88% of JD's T pace, which is at the low end of sweetspot for cycling. I like my easy days in the woods so I'm leaning towards going back to 3 sub T. Kinda funny, my garmin was going crazy during this period. My estimated VO2 max shot up and my estimated 5k time was in the 15s when my PR is high 17s lol. Clearly it's wrong, but maybe it's directionally correct? It's hard to tell knowing that TSS is biased towards volume/ distance. Am I just optimizing for something that isn't that important for a 5k? Maybe. Would this improve my HM? That seems likely, given how poor my HM is compared to 5k. Again, only did it for 4 weeks and then got Covid so not much of a sample size.