Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

You think the concept of fitness is different?

Why not just train like cyclists then?! I'm sure 35 hours per week of running will be no bother.

Skiing and running is much closer in training methodology than running and biking. The racing times are about the same unlike cyclists who can be on the bike for like 6 hours in a race.

What is the primary focus of modifying the Norwegian training approach?

I'm enjoying the thread quizzly.

Doesn't seem to give me an option to click:

"Condense running time so there is more time to go down the pub"

Thank you.

With this thread regularly appearing now on top 10 threads here and all over Reddit , I thought I would give it a read.

Can't help but think I've wasted time I won't get back. To everyone who has contributed, you owe me a day of my life back!

Following a guy who wants to run 5k but no 5k pace? No strides? C'mon guys. Is this some sort of joke? Not a troll, but this surely seems like another lazy version of EIM.

If you want to improve, there's a reason why Daniel's is a legend of the game or something like 18/55 will get the job done. Part of me thinks that the whole thing is a big troll job from the authors here and the joke is on us.

I really thought I was in for something that resonated with me given all the comments, but yet another puffed up version of lazy training that will generate obviously lazy and sub par results.

Maybe I'm a training snob, but I believe you get out what you put in and there's much better ways to train than this if you want to get towards being the best HJ'r you can be.

Cool story, bro.

Yet whilst in his 40s he's gone from 18 > ~15 mins for the 5k without doing strides or race pace: must be magic.

He's said many times there's better ways to train if you are not time crunched...this is for people with 5-8hrs per week. Really this is for us adult runners who have jobs, families and a life outside of running, and also for the injury prone.

Really it's just a system of progressive overload over a long period of time that for many may produce better results than the boom and bust cycles of Daniels et al, partly due to the lower injury risk with sub LT sessions.

Aside, I'm not sure you can class 3 big LT sessions per week as easy/lazy (EIM is however much easier), I'm not sure how you can make a 5-8hr week harder than that without the injury risk growing exponentially.

podcasts.apple.com

The Norwegian method for amateur runners (part 2)

Podcast Episode · The Running Shorts Podcast · 03/21/2025 · 55m

Link:podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-runn...

Update. I’ve now taken about 2.5 minutes off my 5K time in 9 months. Just more evidence that it works.

Hi, I really enjoy your podcast. I notice you and sirpoc himself interact sometimes on Strava. I know you are doing running shorts which I kinda like, but maybe you and him could do a running 'longs' sometime. It would be great at this point to have thoughts from sirpoc himself nearly 2 years on from the initial posts and over 2 years I believe and counting he's been running the system. Just a thought, many thanks!

This is what people really need to realize. I've been doing the sub-T singles 2-3 days a week for a year now and it's been great (I've PR'ed in the 5km and the half marathon last fall). 10,000m of reps can be in the moment, but always controlled and i never feel drained. I never have to commit a ton of time to a weekend (or heaven forbid mid-week) long run. I think my longest runs are around 85 minutes. I never wake up feeling drained from the sessions the day before. The lack of periodized training is (to me) a feature, not a bug - because I never get that burnt out by training and never need to take weeks off after peaking for an "A" race.

But it's not the only way to train.

We discussed Tinman a few pages back; he famously promoted the Critical Velocity system that worked great for so many high school runners; many of which are running well less than the ~7 hours a week that's being committed to this system. Hell, many high schoolers are probably only putting in 3.5 - 4 hours a week across Monday - Friday school days. If that's all a coach can get from them, then they need something more intense to optimize their training load - something like Critical Velocity is great for that.

Sub-elites and Elites (or just hobbyists with way more time) putting in 80+ miles a week can structure things differently, because they have the bandwidth to include workouts like longer LRs, MLRs, literal double thresholds, etc. It's yet again an entirely different set of constraints (to borrow a word or concept from Magness).

Again, big fan of this system and still keeping at it myself after a year. I do think some people have been a bit too dogmatic about it though.

Got a link to sirpoc's Strava?

Hoping to get back to committed hobbyjogger Norwegian training now. Probably weekly schedule of:

Longer Threshold Intervals (800-2K)

Shorter (300-600)

3 easy runs

1 longer run (10-13)

Some weeks swapping out long threshold for hills/speed development and tossing them in the long run. Mostly mile-5mile racing and we’ll see how it goes. Worked for me last time with HM PBs and a best road mile since my younger days on the low end

While I really think highly of this training approach and appreciate all of the discourse on here as well as the NSA strava group, one thing that I wanted to bring up is that *for me* the paces suggested on the excel spreadsheet seem to be overkill when compared to the lactate readings I get when hitting these paces. I have a lactate meter and in order for me to keep my lactate <4 (I personally aim for somewhere between 3.0-3.5) I have to run slower by a significant amount (15-20 seconds/mile) to stay under threshold. It could be because I am not as aerobically as fit as sirpoc and others, I'm not quite sure. Before you ask, I plugged in a 5k time trial result done untapered in non-carbon fiber shoes to generate my suggested 4min, 8min, 12min workout pace. What I've found is that if the intervals even feel slightly hard then my lactate reading at the end is usually >4. Additionally, I would recommend against trying to correlate HR with lactate levels (obviously if your HR is 200 your lactate is going to be high and vice versa) but I've done workouts where my HR has stayed relatively low and my lactate reading was 6.X
Overall, I think purchasing the lactate meter has been helpful for my situation or else I would be frying myself trying to hit the suggested interval paces when they seem to not quite fit the bill for me

Have you actually done a step test to get some concept of your personal lactate curve and baseline?

The most likely explanation is that you're not aerobically fit enough to keep up with the paces that the spreadsheet calculates, but there's also a possibility that your threshold simply runs higher. Some people can have a lactate threshold higher than 4.0.

Yep, I've done one at a university lab. My lactate curve started rising exponentially at a relatively low lactate level of around 3.0.

I'm not sirpoc-level fit, but I'm also not a 30min 5k'er. My race performances equivalents are pretty spot on from 5k-marathon so I didn't think I was lacking too much in the aerobic department but who knows.

I am still sticking to the NSA but I just adjust the paces so they're slower. I did briefly try to run them at the prescribed paces, but over time the workouts started to feel hard (way too hard for sub-T) and unsustainable and I could sense I was not recovering from one workout to the next well.

stay on reddit, clown

no one cares what your believe or if youre a slow reader

If you have a lactate meter and know your lactate curve, you do not need the paces. This is the kind of crazy I have seen on the Strava group before, when there was less members. There was one dude who was trying to follow the paces even though he knew it was shooting him in the 4+ range.

There will always be outliers I guess, the paces are a guide and supposed to work as a proxy for the majority of people who don't lactate test. You don't need to worry about this if you have control over your curve and testing. You are over complicating it by even worrying about paces.