Frank Shorter almost never ran tempos...

willie loman wrote:

And for what it's worth, the idea that some runners might not do tempo runs isn't THAT crazy. In fact, it's the entire basis of Stephen Seiler's research on polarized training. The observation is that elite endurance athletes across a variety of sports tend to do (simplifying here) about 80 percent of their training very easy and 20 percent very hard, with not much in the middle. There's some data on polarized training in runners, although the picture isn't as clear as some make it out to be.

Sellers routinely counts tempo runs as hard efforts to make his math work out... Go lool at Seidals training and its ton of tempo work and how they said it still fit his model.

Seiler basically just says don't train between 2.5 and 4 mmol of lactate. This basically means, don't train between marathon and half marathon pace... This is exactly where Shorter trained every Sunday for the second half of his long run (going with the training near marathon pace in the thick of training is harder than that same pace on race day, meaning training at that pace is closer to half marathon pace). Seiler is a great source for track training, but his "useless" 2.5 - 4 mmol zone is a staple of a lot of great marathoners.

My understanding of Seiller is that Threshold runs fall into the 20% hard.

Depending on how you define a Tempo, it may fall into the 20% hard zone or the moderate zone. Training is still done in the moderate zone, but not a lot. I understood, that because elite have high thresholds, the moderate zone is very small compared to a recreational runner.

This has to be one of the best LR threads I have read. Thank You all, great perspectives. I have read both of Frank's books, and he recounts only Intervals (mostly 400s) and long runs (which he supposedly ran so easy that others were surprised--until they tried to run the 400s with him, he said). I was in college slightly after Frank and we ran tons of mileage (always too fast, in No Man's Land, 82%+ of Max HR) and then also tons of hard 400s with short rest. We ran really good marathons off that, like Frank ran great ones off it. Buddy Edelen was doing this kind of training in England (first American at 2:14). I don't know about Frank and hard short or long runs, but I know Bill Squires had Rodgers/GBTC doing "hard 10 milers" pretty often--aka "Tempo." Last point: "Tempo" might be best used as part of a mix or progression in the Long Run. One day/one workout. Then back to Easy plus 5k intervals and 400/Minute reps. Thank You all again, great input. JR PVD RI

Alfie wrote:

My understanding of Seiller is that Threshold runs fall into the 20% hard.

Sort of, but that's Matt Fitzgerald's simplification of Seiler's framework. Seiler would actually subdivide training into three zones, with the middle being "threshold." The breakdown for what Seiler considers polarized training would something like 75-5-20 or 80-5-15. The point is not that they NEVER spend any time at threshold, but that it's de-emphasized compared to both low-intensity training AND high-intensity training.

The approach that (I think) is more common among runners these days is more accurately called "pyramidal" rather that "polarized." You're still spending most (e.g. 75-80%) of your time at low intensity, but the other two zones are flipped, so you might spend 15-20% of your time around threshold and 5% of your time at high intensity.

At a certain point, the distinction between those two models gets a little hazy, e.g. it can depend on whether you're calculating by time or distance, so it's probably not worth getting too fussed about. You can read more about the various types of training distributions here: