Matt Fitzgerald's new book 80/20 Running - Rojo what can u tell us about this book since you wrote the foreward

dsrunner wrote:

All of this progress in distance training and the continued obsession with mega-miles has moved us further away from the Kenyans in the half marathon and marathon.

Actually, I think the high volume training of Geoffrey Mutai that has been receptively cited here and elsewhere would fall in-line, generally speaking, with this 80-easy/20-hard philosophy.

bloviating wrote:

The man who deserves most of the credit for legitimizing polarized training is Dr. Seiler, yet somehow how name will be lost ....

Interesting citation of Dr. Seiler.

Here is another. Are you familiar with Ernst van Aaken?:

(from wikipeadia)

Ernst van Aaken was a German sports physician and athletics trainer. Van Aaken became known as the "Running Doctor" and was the founder of the training method called the Waldnieler Dauerlauf (German: "Waldniel endurance run"). He is generally recognized as the founder of the long slow distance method of endurance training.[1][2]

As a sports physician, trainer and advocate of new developments he directed himself fanatically to distance running and the training of "pure endurance" ("reine Ausdauer") with high mileage in the training program. He was an opponent of the method of interval training that prevailed until halfway the sixties.

Is it spelled foreward in the book? Not that I would expect Rojo to notice.

Joggernaut wrote:

Americans in particular like to search for easy solutions and magic bullets. But in endurance sport, there is no easy way.

I never understood this macho talk about volume. What could be easier than long slow mileage? I agree that it's good training, but it's not difficult.

I think that the research on 80 / 20 training needs to be looked at carefully. In particular, since the research includes "power endurance sports" like rowing and cycling and nordic skiing, I believe that the type of runner who will benefit most from 80 / 20 training is the fast-twitch muscle fibre type runner: easy runs and big volumes to develop the weaker "slow twitch fibres" and high intensity runs to develop the aerobic ability of the "fast twitch fibres".

Jonathan Gault wrote:

actually... wrote:

From the review "First, and most obviously, more volume improves aerobic capacity"

But that's just not true, it's a popular myth. Not that you are really interested, just thought I would point it out anyway.

What's your proof for this?

Fitzgerald's claim is that the primary fitness gains from high volume came in areas other than aerobic capacity. But (if I read it correctly), he still asserts that volume does increase aerobic capacity somewhat. Just wondering if you had evidence that supports your point as I'd be interested to read it.

Ah so someone is interested in real science and not just received wisdom?

Aerobic capacity is best measured as oxygen uptake right? In the absolute measurment, it is measured in liters per minute, although the figure does go up and down every few seconds. In conventional wisdom, the weight related figure is the one considered, but this of course changes with increases and decreases in body fat, even if the absolute figure stays the same.

The absolute figure is dependent on basic health and basic fitness, so extra mileage won't change it, although it may sometimes appear that way from test to test, because it depends on the accuracy of the test and the test conditions. Heat and humiidity can change the measurement by 20% or more as some blood is directed to the skin for sweating.

If you look at information from a tester who has lots of reliable figures such as Jack Daniels, these points are well demonstrated.

Sorry to harp on the PEDs thing, and I really don't know much about this particular book, but anytime I start seeing the examples of pro runners used to illustrate a general point about training, I feel skeptical. "Mo Farah does this, so you, Mr 19-minute-5k, should also do this". Mo Farah might be able to train harder a lot of the time due to PEDs, or if not PEDs, whatever enhancements NOP can provide. What if you had a book from a couple of years ago and it said, well, Rita Jeptoo used to do her easy runs at 7:30 pace, but then she switched to doing them at 6:00 pace, and dropped her PR from 2:23 to 2:18?

We don't know who is on PEDs, but we know some (probably a significant percentage of elites) are doping. I think it could actually be harmful to some runners to read about how hard an elite runner trains, and then try to emulate them, only to find out later that they were able to train so hard because they had "assistance".

It is interesting to read how the pros train, but I don't think using the methodology of pros in a drug-tainted era is all that helpful, so there is no point using them as examples. I find the older pros - Lydiard's runners, and others from the older era - more helpful as examples, because their reality more closely matches that of an average non-elite athlete - they had jobs, they couldn't shuttle back and forth from one training camp to another, EPO didn't exist for them, etc. If they did something in training and it worked, it seems easier to believe that I (the 19-minute 5k guy) might be able to use those principles too.

Not saying this ties in with what is said in the book - more just a general principle that it is interesting to me what Farah, Radcliffe, Mutai, Kimetto, et al do, but not very useful for my own training.

No, we don't know who is on PED's, but really I don't care as much as others, because I don't believe in the PED concept.

Really if EPO/Blood transfusions is so effective, then why did no-one run as quick in the 70's?

Today's athltes at the top level have to train harder. You don't need drugs to do that. If you think you do, then you don't know what you are doing.

Sam in Oakland wrote:

Wait. What gives me most pause were the lines about 'the mind' from the Letsrun review:

When discussing Fitzgerald on Radcliffe and aerobic capacity, Gault notes, "Fitzgerald posits that Radcliffe’s improvements were achieved largely through mental gains and better running economy." He goes on to again stress, "Fitzgerald argues that form is overrated and that it is more important to run with minimal mental effort."

So besides running economy (which I've also found to be a bit nebulous in terms of meaning), volume makes me 'think' with less effort as I run? The mental aspect of running at race pace is less taxing?

I didn't really get the mental part of it. He talked a lot about that. Maybe we'll have a podcast about it.

The guy who talks a lot about PEDs makes a point I agree with. I think it's laughable to talk about many of the WR holders as I think some of them were certainly doped.

Great point. But it's worth pointing out that elites didn't become elites because of PEDs. The elites who use PEDs likely do so to REMAIN competitive at that level; in their minds, prevailing suspicions likely force their hand. But they were accomplished well beforehand. Can we take the Tony Robbins' approach and learn a few things from them? Sure, but those lessons don't always apply, as you mention.

I've always been more intrigued as to WHY RUNNERS FAIL, more than the whys and hows of the elites and their successes. And we miss a lot when all we do is study success. We can say for example that all successful elites have at least one thing in common: they all take dumps. But obviously it's pretty idiotic to think that that has anything to do with being an elite, and no one in their right mind would look at taking a dump as a determinant of success.

The problem of course is that accurate data from failure tends to disappear (just the same, the information gathered from success may not be entirely truthful, especially when retold by others) and the excuses can run rampant and cloud matters. (The excuses may even run more than the failed runners did!) And too many variables can occur to determine clear causes of failure, adding to an already full "randomness factor." In business, a company that fails disappears quickly, offering nothing in terms of how it went under. The successful ones stick around and so people look more closely at them. But understanding the effect of this limited sampling of failure has value too, for if for no other reason than to tell us what doesn't work.

For whatever reason I find it somewhat disheartening to watch others (even anonymous folk) make so many mistakes, after having done so myself (and having witnessed so many others having done so), but I've come to accept that it's their journey and theirs alone. So many of us remain hard-headed and unwilling to learn from anyone, including ourselves.

dsfksadl;gkalkdf;q3opwriqopwet wrote:

Shawn H wrote:

Mo Farah typically does his easy day runs at about 7:00 per mile.

This is documented to be false. I don't even want to provide a citation because it's such incredibly common knowledge and as been discussed to death. Seriously man. Even mentioned in this thread.

Maybe I'll provide one citation. IAAF recently published an article on Levins and it features a quote about dropping 5:20s at the end of an easy run with Farah and Rupp.

Read the article I posted above. Just reporting what has been reported before.

Here's that article again. It clearly states that Mo Farah was running approximtely 40% of his "easy" running at 7:00 per mile pace UNTIL last fall when he started training for the marathon. Then Salazar had him drop down to 5:30 pace on "easy" days. If that's true, it sure didn't seem to help him run as fast in the marathon as many people had predicted, although he still ran a very respectable time. Yet while he was doing all that reported 7:00 pace running he was the most dominant 5K/10K runner in the world, including during the 2012 Olympics.

http://www.runnersworld.com/race-training/the-easy-day-pace

video wouldn't open in Safari or Chrome...?

The Red Panda wrote:

For those who are interested, here is some of the research for 80 / 20 running in a video lecture on polarized training:

http://www.canal-insep.fr/fr/training-periodization-deep-root-cultural-heritage-and-innovative-paradigms-2013/ei_13_10_va_pr_stephen_seiler-mov

bloviating wrote:

The man who deserves most of the credit for legitimizing polarized training is Dr. Seiler, yet somehow how name will be lost as Fitzgerald reaps the benefits of another one of his attempts at cashing in and dumbing down for the masses. Dr. Seiler himself cannot fully pinpoint why polarized training works only that it does based on the training logs of cyclists, runners, cross country skiers, etc.

Fitzgerald sites and gives credit to Seiler many times in the book. It's not Matt's problem if Seiler didn't cash in on his own research.

Fitzgerald's argument is that high mileage, achieved through low-intensity training helps develop a quality called “relaxed smooth ease.” Basically, this means the runner's brain is "quiet" while he's running. The less the effort the body expends for each stride, the more efficient it becomes. And greater efficiency means faster times over the same distance.

Here's what Fitzgerald wrote on p98:

"Because no two strides that you take are exactly the same, each stride constitutes a small experiment. Your next stride may be slightly more efficient than the one before (requiring less muscle activation to sustain the same pace) or slightly less efficient. If it's more efficient, your brain is likely to "select" it, remembering key details or the activation pattern that produced it and incorporating them into the blueprint for your stride, thus making it more efficient generally...That's where repetition comes in. High-volume training packs more strides into less time, resulting in faster progress. And keeping the intensity low most of the time -- in other words, following the 80/20 Rule -- allows you to run more without burning out."

The goal is ultimately for the brain to be selecting the most efficient stride possible for each stride and to do so with minimal mental effort.

Shawn H wrote:

It's not uncommon for top runners to do the majority of their running (I didn't say "most" because i think they do more than 20% quality, but probably not more than 30%) at a relatively slow pace. .

30% quality is a absolutely insane. If I have any objection to the 80/20 rule, it's that even 20% is way too much, unless you're a marathoner and your MP work counts towards the 20, even though it's below LT.

Take a hypothetical very hard week for a high level runner. Say workout one is 8x1k at 3-5k pace (a classic "VO2 interval" as Daniels would call it). Workout 2 is 7 miles at LT (really brutal, though I admit the trend is towards more LT intervals and more total volume, as opposed to single runs). Workout 3 is sprints and hills totaling no more than a mile. Heck, we can throw in an extra three miles of LT at the end of a long run for workout 4. That's still just 16 miles, and that's a super tough week for most people. Maybe impossibly tough. But if it's 20% of your mileage, then you're only doing 80. If it's 30% (like your hypothetical pros), then you're only doing 53 miles!

rojo wrote:

renewed marathoner wrote:

The argument you make about wejo assumes the period where he ran easy days faster and easy days slower are independent.

Its possible you are right, but it is also possible that his actual training combination (years of faster easy runs followed by years of slower easy runs) are why he improved so much..

great point. I hadnt' really considered that.

I think there's a lot to this. I've so often heard stories about how, "I was doing my training like X for so long, and I totally changed it up, and suddenly I PR'ed." It doesn't necessarily mean that the recent training was better. It could mean that there wasn't enough variation in the training, and after maxing out certain parameters with very focused training, it was hard to improve without changing one's focus.

My approach has evolved towards non-linear periodization, where during the period far from competition the line gets a bit blurred between workouts and easy running. The "workouts" are no big deal (e.g., 6x800 at 5k pace with a SLOW 400 jog between reps, 4x1mile at LT with 2 minutes easy jog), but lots of the "easy" mileage is done close to ventilary threshold. Then, as the workouts start getting harder and harder, the other days become slower and slower, but the total mileage doesn't drop. If anything, it gets higher.

Jonathan Gault wrote:

"Because no two strides that you take are exactly the same, each stride constitutes a small experiment. Your next stride may be slightly more efficient than the one before (requiring less muscle activation to sustain the same pace) or slightly less efficient. If it's more efficient, your brain is likely to "select" it, remembering key details or the activation pattern that produced it and incorporating them into the blueprint for your stride, thus making it more efficient generally...That's where repetition comes in. High-volume training packs more strides into less time, resulting in faster progress. And keeping the intensity low most of the time -- in other words, following the 80/20 Rule -- allows you to run more without burning out."

By what means has Fitzgerald ascertained that the brain is capable of determining the efficiency of a single stride? Is this strictly theorizing on his part or does he have some actual neurologically based studies that support this? 'Efficiency' is an abstract concept bound to predefined parameters and can vary depending on what constitutes 'efficiency' from a given perspective. Somehow the brain would have to be dialed in to the exact intercellular metabolic processes within muscle cells and actually ascertain the relationship of ATP production to glycogen depletion to oxygen consumption, all within a single contraction cycle and draw comparison to a set of previous collected data, resulting in an evaluation of whether a single stride is more or less 'efficient' than another. Quite frankly, it sounds like he's talking out of his ass.

The Red Panda wrote:

I think that the research on 80 / 20 training needs to be looked at carefully. In particular, since the research includes "power endurance sports" like rowing and cycling and nordic skiing, I believe that the type of runner who will benefit most from 80 / 20 training is the fast-twitch muscle fibre type runner: easy runs and big volumes to develop the weaker "slow twitch fibres" and high intensity runs to develop the aerobic ability of the "fast twitch fibres".

I think this is a good point - each runner type responds in his/her own way to different types of training, there are no absolute rights or wrongs.

Just as important, every training method eventually leads to a performance plateau after a while. When this happens, introducing something new often works, just by virtue of being different.

For example someone who has done "slow" long runs for many years might improve by introducing some faster / marathon pace miles in his long runs, just as someone who has always done "faster" long runs may benefit from switching to slow and longer long runs.

Doing X after many years of Y will be greatly beneficial. So will doing Y after many years of X. This will lead to many books written on how vastly superior Y is to X, and an equal number of books claiming the reverse. This summarizes the running litterature. Just think of any debate: volume vs intensity, pace of long runs/speed work, short vs long intervals , tempo vs interval training, recovery runs vs total rest (junk mile debate), cross training useful or waste of time, stretching/weight training useful vs harmful, etc. etc.

My philosophy is to try and introduce something new every year in my training: be it short intervals, hill work, trail running, cross training, pylometrics, stretching, weight training, etc. Most changes tend to bring positive adaptations.