Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

6 days * avg 90 minutes per run = 9 hours. ST - EZ - ST - EZ - ST - LR - REST.

In early posts sirpoc said his workout paces were slow but i find that disingenuous. There's nothing easy about sirpocs training. Maybe it's easy to him, which is ultimately why he improved so much.

When he was running mid 17s he was doing workouts like 10xk at 5:50 and easy runs at 7:50. Later 6x1600 around 5:40 or even 5:30 or so as he got to low 17.

This is just standard training and some people can do it whilst others will hit their ceiling.

I think it's cool what he's done but anyone new here should realise his training was never easy. There is no secret hack if that's what you are looking for.

You're correct in that he did those sessions and paces. I'd also agree that it's actually hard training, especially sessions like 10x1k three times per week, I rarely make it to 10 despite being ahead (in terms of 5k time) of where he was at that time, and I typically do them slower than he did then. So I agree he's probably got a good capacity to do the work and absorb it (maybe I've just got a bad capacity).

I disagree that it's standard training though, I've not seen 3 threshold sessions plus only easy runs before in any training plans, especially the lack of speedwork, continuous tempo runs or Vo2 max efforts (you could argue the latter comes from racing regularly). In relation to it being "slow", I suppose he meant it's slow in comparison to vo2 max sessions, 5k specific, or speed work.

So I kind of agree with some of your points, but not all. Massive respect to sirpoc for laying it all out!

It's easy in the sense you can do it 3 times a week for 2+ years at this point. The relative pace is largely irrelevant. He's usually under threshold that's all that matters and clearly can recover for the next session .and I've literally never seen him to an easy day run above 70% MHR.

Nobody can smash workouts 3 times a week for 2 years. So there is a huge amount of intensity control and discipline here. Just about everyone who has done this for a period of time, feels fresh and ready to go. Of those, a huge number have improved. That is the secret here. It's just frameworked in a way I think runners haven't really necessarily thought about before. Load versus recovery versus slow progression.

Count me on the number of people who have done this. It certainly feels easy in comparison to just about any training plan I've ever done. Add me also to the list who is a lot faster. I think sometimes people think this is just one person improving. There are probably hundreds of not thousands at this point. The Strava group alone is around 3k. The pace ranges are obviously just a guide and I think he always meant them to be just that. For me, I go actually a bit easier than him on the longer ones, harder on shorter ones relative to my fitness. It's still in and around sub t for me. Again you are getting wrapped up in paces. Sub threshold isn't a pace and never will be.

The chances are even training like this you won't hit your ceiling for a long while and there's still a lot of low hanging fruit for folks out there. If you do, you do. But I would be willing to met that's a minority and a small one. I'm relativelly slower I guess than most. But I finally broke sub 19 training like this after years of slogging away and have now ran 17:47. Yes I'm slow. But I would also challenge anyone to have given me a more manageable way to handle the load to get to this mediocre talent point. It only took 7 years of trying!

Very nice! Much appreciated hrpomrx

Yeah, I'm kind of at this inflection point where I've been doing the 70-85 mile pfitz thing for a few years now, and I'm just not getting any faster at this point. At age 40, and a slow recoverer at that, I'm really interested in this method. However, not totally sold on shaving 20-30 mpw. Trying to hold 70 ish while sticking to the fundamentals of this method. I suppose I'm skirting closer to needing doubles? 2:50 btw, so my miles take a lot longer in a week than it does for many of you

I think that's getting into the realm of needing to double. Maybe try doubling easy days first, and do 40 minutes of work per sub T session to give you an 80:20 split?

Since Derek Clayton was mentioned recently, I thought that I would bring folks attention to this:

The temporal response of CTL of a hypothetical leap from 0 to 100 TSS/d is shown in Fig. 2 of my original article:

trainingpeaks.com

The Science of the TrainingPeaks Performance Manager

@trainingpeaks

Dr. Andy Coggan explains the incredible science behind the Performance Management Chart in TrainingPeaks.

Open link

Another way of looking at it is that your CTL mostly (~90%) reflects what you have been doing for the last 3 months.

(42 d time constant = 29 d half-life; 3 half lives = 87.5% of the way to complete equilibrium.)

I highly doubt his method was fully fleshed out when he was only running over 17:00s for the 5k, as those mile paces are way too fast for the method he describes today. I'm running 15:40s and improving doing mile repeats at 5:35 ish, now, following the paces guided by his modern approach.

The workouts, as prescribed, by approximate paces:

5-7 x 1600m 60” rest @ 10mi pace
20-30 x 400m 30” rest @ 10k pace
8-12 x 1K with 60" rest at 10mi to 15K pace (a lil quicker than 1600s)
4-6 x 2K with 60" rest at HM pace
3-4 x 3K with 60" rest at 30K pace

As you can see when he was running 17:30s the modern approach would have him doing kilometers at around 5:55s ish so that part is totally reasonable, but then the mile repeats for someone running 17:00 would be more like 5:50s for mile repeats using the Tinman race equivalency calculator formulas. So if you really saw him doing 5:30s that was just him experimenting and not part of the true 'finalized' method seen today.

Another important thing to note is that all of his races were on random parkruns, some being quite awful courses. It's very possible that when he was running 17:30s that his 5k fitness on a track could've been way low 17s already, and then low 17s on a bad course being more like 16:40s, etc, so his workout paces (on a track, or on the clear open roads) would be quicker than his races on messy parkrun courses suggest.

Everything about his training when I've adapted it for my own use has been easier than how I used to train (practically gutting a race effort vo2max workout or sprint 200m speedwork twice/thrice a week) and I've found it very absorbable after a few months with solid endurance improvements that just creep up on you. Suddenly one day 5:00 pace is easier than it's ever been even though you never touch within 20s of it in training :/

So yes, it might be a runner type-specific method, maybe there are only some people for which this is easy, but I just wanna say the 17:00 5k to 5:30 mile repeats isn't realistic. The whole point is that it's not the workouts that get to you, the workout paces and execution are highkey easy and maybe 'boring', but the repeated 48hour cycle of doing a new workout with only one rest day between makes your legs heavy and fatigued gradually over time, and your easy pace will be absolutely shuffling for a long while. But once you grow out of that fatigue and easy pace starts feeling strong again, keep it up and the world's your oyster.

And another thing…who drinks a beer the night before a marathon? Only an obvious fraud or coward

He’s out here hurting the feelings of these trolls — do you have no decency Sirpoc, if that’s even your real online persona

What’s next? You going to tell us your cadence is really 300 spm?

> 1K reps (usually 8-12 x 1K) with 60" rest at 10mi to 15K pace

That was from "Summary", but Sirpoc's earlier post had it

> 10x1k is around 12-15k pace.

For example 5:50/mi 12k pace corresponds to a 17:20 5k. Or a 4:59/mi 12k pace a 30:41 10k. I think Sirpoc tends to do the first rep on the slow end and then shave seconds off.

I've hesitated to post this before because the obvious answer is that 12k/15k are pretty similar and you shouldn't be using the prescribed paces to squeeze out the last drop; you should be doing it with your lactate meter and percieved fatigue.

But I do think "Summary"'s time based rep conversion tends to give the short reps too slow. For a slower runner like me 3 minutes at 15k pace could be 15+ seconds/mile slower than a 36 minute race pace. (36 minutes because a 36 minute 12k corresponds to 3 minutes per k.)

Not quite sure why I am bothering replying or even checked, but I just picked a random session of 10x1km when I was around a 17 flat runner, had just ran 16:58 I think. 3:35 average per km. Which is 5:48

Found a set of mile repeats the same week. 3:39 average per km. Which is about 5:52.

3km repeats that week, 3:45 /km average pace. Which is 6:02.

That all looks like it comes from a unusuallly non windy week as all the paces were pretty even.

I think the paces have stood the test of time reasonably well. Some find them OK. Some have started out going slower and working their way into them. Ultimately, unless you lactate test to find out the pace bands for you, it's a guess where each person fits into it. But the beauty of testing first is that, 90% of the time I found you can then basically predict what lactate is anyway, so you can throw that away and save some money. Perfectly acceptable for our level of hobby. Not for a pro.

One more look: The next week, was windy, was slower overall (as your expect in the wind) but with some reps on the out and back almost 20 seconds apart. The pace doesn't mean much on an individual rep when you have 25mph + tailwinds.

I follow sirpocs training and was blown away by his marathon time, mainly because I know really good runners who put in a lot of time training and got nowhere near it.

Which leads me onto my main question. I understand that all things equal, if you only have a certain range of time available then NSA is brutally efficient and effective. However I'm stumped as to whether it may also be more effective than someone running say 80-100mpw and doing a more traditional approach of 2 hard sessions and probably running the other days a touch too fast rather than true recovery pace?

Is there something about the traditional approach whereby you may be doing more work/harder sessions but not absorbing it all? It can't just be about aerobic development because as I said, the people I know have years of 80-100mpw behind them. It's not as if sirpoc has a beautifully fluent stride that he can leverage to his advantage either.

And that's not getting into the pints and mars bars.

So to summarise, is say 60 miles a week with 3 sub T sessions likely to bring about better gains than 80 miles a week with 2 anaerobic sessions?

I actually was going to reply to this post, I saw it last night but see it's been deleted ha ha.

The spelling told me I knew (or has a good idea) who it was, as they had used a similar spelling mistake in an email exchange with me. Why they got all upset because I didn't want to go on their "channel" and then chose to come to an online forum to vent, is a little odd.

Even more odd, is the person in question is also coach who sells coaching plans and didn't seem to have a clue about what I was talking about, in explaining all I am doing is assessing the impact of load in my training and then adding more. They couldn't get their head around this it seems. Not that I'm saying that is even important to everyone, but it's certainly always been one way to look at the puzzle across aerobic sports.

I also explained I am not really the kind of person to go on because I don't have anything to promote or sell which seems to be what a lot of people go onto these channels for , of which they said "your method to sell". When I explained that I'm not trying to sell my method they seemed a little annoyed that it might be trying to impinge on their coaching by giving stuff away for free. Again, I find this a little bizarre. You would need to question your coaching if I'm putting you out of business.

Also, why then have someone trying to sell coaching (not that I am) on another influencers platform? I've been asked a lot about going on podcasts or doing things with people. But this definitely was one of the more bizarre exchanges I've had.

Anyway , I'm sure to hit the guy up down the line when I'm selling the book that doesn't exist entitled "Training and racing without a power meter: because it hasn't been invented yet - how I shuffled my way to a marathon" with the foreward by Andrew Coggan or I'm selling t-shirts with "do the sirpoopy shuffle on".

This is my take whilst I'm here. If you can sustain the mileage and not feel beat up, runs around 90-95% M pace are probably the ticket to an even better marathon on a regular basis. The downside for me is two guys a little slower than me who did almost double the mileage just seemed so beat up and tired and drained. Talking to them, they said this is how you are meant to feel. To me this can't be right. You don't need to run yourself into the ground to do a marathon in my opinion. I don't really see the point in implementing a strategy like that on lets just say 8 hours a week, for arguments sake.

If you have time to slowly increase your mileage, more mileage will help. But it still needs to be sustainable and slowly built up. You have guys jumping from nothing into unbelievablely steep marathon builds from boom and bust cycles.

The "special block" I did. If you see the 24km progressive I did with a 10 min warm up and down, was like 92-93-100 MP. It felt really, really hard. Like really hard. I can't imagine doing stuff like this regular and still being able to train properly in the following week other than easy miles for at least 3-4 days. Which then leads to the question, is it worth it? The load you absorb in that session you could have done more across Tuesday - Thursday - Saturday with something like my schedule.

I wouldn't want to say my 70 miles is worth more than someone else's 90 miles. That's too hard to say. I do think some people who are running more mileage than me though, aren't getting their best bang for buck. Ultimately, that's all anyone should be asking. "Is this the best use of my time?"

I will say, I don't think there was another way that for myself, I could have done enough work to run a 2:24 any other way in the time I had.

Anyway I'm posting way too much this week, the beauty of having somewhat of a down week is the time I have been able to waste on here ha ha back to normal from tomorrow.

Sirpoc,

thanks for not being your standard internet "use-link-in-description-to-get-15%-off-and-a-free-travel-pack" grifter.

Having run a marathon last Sunday as well (not London) and beaten my PB on a standard cycle (but feeling beat down into the ground from it), I'm going to switch to TheMethod(tm) from tomorrow on. It makes total sense to me, and while we only have anecdata up until now (would love to see actual studies done on it), I'm pretty convinced of its efficacy.

PS:
If you ever sell "sirpoopy shuffle" shirts, let me know. :-)

Would be brilliant wearing one of these the other side of the world over here in Australia and watching other runners as I run past.

"weird look"

"weird look"

"weird look"

"knowing look and a nod @ sub threshold"

"weird look"