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?
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.
I know it's all hypotheticals and guesswork but is your training scalable? If you ran more easy runs and extended the sessions from 6 x 1.6 to 7 x 1.6 and 10 x 1k to 12 x 1k regularly then would an 80/90 mile week be more sustainable?
I think part of the issue I have with Pfitz/JD is the long taper. For these plans it is necessary due to the nature but SirPoc you're getting an extra week or 2 of training in when when everyone else is tired and reducing
Question for sirpoc or anyone who has been determining the intensity of their reps by lactate for a while -- as runners get fitter, the lactate curve shifts to the left, i.e. their lactate threshold will occur at a smaller absolute concentration of lactate. So perhaps it goes from, say, 4 mmol when you first started serious training to 2.5 mmol after a few years. Do you plan to reduce the desired amount of lactate in your workout days to account for this? I'm just thinking that, at some point, doing workouts at 2.5 to 3 mmol is potentially going to be an unsustainably hard effort for three workouts a week. But maybe that point is very far in the future.
Is there something about the traditional approach whereby you may be doing more work/harder sessions but not absorbing it all?
I think absolutely yes. We know that overtraining can lead to non-adaptation or regression, so there is surely a possibility that some people using the traditional approach are in a state that isn't obviously overtraining but nevertheless is some relatively mild, hard-to-spot version of overtraining.
Question for sirpoc or anyone who has been determining the intensity of their reps by lactate for a while -- as runners get fitter, the lactate curve shifts to the left, i.e. their lactate threshold will occur at a smaller absolute concentration of lactate. So perhaps it goes from, say, 4 mmol when you first started serious training to 2.5 mmol after a few years. Do you plan to reduce the desired amount of lactate in your workout days to account for this? I'm just thinking that, at some point, doing workouts at 2.5 to 3 mmol is potentially going to be an unsustainably hard effort for three workouts a week. But maybe that point is very far in the future.
You mean shift to the right, correct? And your absolute concentration baseline may be higher OR lower that all depends on the type of training youre doing week in and week out
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?
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.
To this point, The Triathlon Hour with Alex Yee episode is a fantastic addition to this topic and he goes over in detail how he approaches tweaking his training to prep for London.
This is in the context of an Olympic triathlete with a fairly steep metabolic profile and wide gap between lt1/lt2 to his approach at zone compression and how he was trying to move his first threshold higher in preparation for London.
His running mileage wasnt outrageous either since he was staying in contact with swimming/cycling throughout the block for maintenance
Question for sirpoc or anyone who has been determining the intensity of their reps by lactate for a while -- as runners get fitter, the lactate curve shifts to the left, i.e. their lactate threshold will occur at a smaller absolute concentration of lactate. So perhaps it goes from, say, 4 mmol when you first started serious training to 2.5 mmol after a few years. Do you plan to reduce the desired amount of lactate in your workout days to account for this? I'm just thinking that, at some point, doing workouts at 2.5 to 3 mmol is potentially going to be an unsustainably hard effort for three workouts a week. But maybe that point is very far in the future.
You mean shift to the right, correct? And your absolute concentration baseline may be higher OR lower that all depends on the type of training youre doing week in and week out
Argggh sorry yes. Can't seem to edit it now.
But, the shift in the curve that happens with training is a product of factors like improved fat oxidation and improved lactate clearance, so those will result in a changed curve independent of the baseline. And yes, the baseline can vary, but in general it's going to track fitness. Though I suppose a very fit person eating enormous quantities of sugar might be an exception to the usual inverse relationship between fitness and baseline lactate!
The threshold in threshold based training refers to the inflection point of the curve. This is inherently relative to individual baseline. So to some extent you have to monitor for changes in baseline to be totally accurate in your personally defined threshold efforts/duration, however in practice it seems almost certainly that the aerobic changes are going to dwarf the changes in glycolysis utilization. Also, FWIW, aerobic improvements shift the curve to the right, baseline lactate production improvements mostly shift the curve down since the vertical axis is lactate concentration.
has pretty good graphs illustrating these changes.
Using lactate as a performance measure offers a number of important benefits over just power and heart rate data alone (e.g. FTP testing or power profiling). In this post, we will explain the key insights that lactate testing...
You mean shift to the right, correct? And your absolute concentration baseline may be higher OR lower that all depends on the type of training youre doing week in and week out
Argggh sorry yes. Can't seem to edit it now.
But, the shift in the curve that happens with training is a product of factors like improved fat oxidation and improved lactate clearance, so those will result in a changed curve independent of the baseline. And yes, the baseline can vary, but in general it's going to track fitness. Though I suppose a very fit person eating enormous quantities of sugar might be an exception to the usual inverse relationship between fitness and baseline lactate!
Im just trying to highlight that profiles will be different based on explosiveness and focus in training (Olympic/Sprint Triathlete vs Ironman Triathlete; 1500/5000m track guys vs Marathoners).
In both cases, the former is going to have a punchier curve with much less steepness near the second threshold and likely a higher baseline and harder to identify LT1. The latter youd expect a shallow baseline with a clearly identifiable LT1 and a very dramatic (exponential) slope approaching LT2
In the former case youd also expect less zone compression (LT1 and LT2 occurring further apart) as opposed to the pure diesels at the other end where that gap is much closer between those thresholds
I'm late to this thread, or should I say movement? But after going through the first couple decades of pages (and related and referenced material) with a fine-tooth comb over the past week, I felt compelled to chime in. I've spent a decade reading mostly nonsense here on LR (it's addictive) and some hidden gems here and there. This discussion (25 pages in, at least!) is hands down the best of them all.
I thought I knew a thing or two about running. Instead, I feel like I now know why I went years without improving before eventually flaming out a couple of years back, physically and mentally shot from doing everything I possibly could to become a slightly faster hobby jogger.
After a few years "out of the game" to mend my wounds, I'd been feeling the itch again this spring. While I've enjoyed running since I picked it up as an "adult onset runner" almost a decade back, it was always "the grind" that appealed the most to me. To get up in the morning and work towards a specific goal. To stand on the starting line of an event ready to test your mettle. To go up against yourself and find out what you're made of during the race. The addictive high after a good race!
You know, all of that.
Going out for a few runs every week just doesn't scratch that itch. And, as I'm going on forty now, I've been feeling like it's last chance saloon if I want to try to raise the ceiling a little bit. But I knew I couldn't go back to doing the same thing I was doing before. I just don't have the mental fortitude to stretch myself like that any more, never mind the non-stop rounds of illness every time a bug or virus crossed the state line.
So I'd decided to make another go of it, but I have to change things up. This time around I'll do lower mileage and less taxing workouts. Prioritise consistency and see where it leads me. Although the marathon is my white whale, I was (still am) content to resign myself to my current PB. But maybe a different approach could help me improve my other PBs, 5k and 10k. Maybe even the half?
Imagine stumbling across this thread almost by coincidence mere days after making that decision.
So here I am!
Like I mentioned, I've not been running a lot the last couple of years. Around 1600 kilometres (a thousand miles) last year, give or take. My fitness isn't anywhere close to where it used to be. My weight has gone up. I'm a little older, a little softer.
And still this thread has given me hope that maybe, just _maybe_, there's a chance! That this old dog might yet have a fast race in him. If I can play it smart this time around, instead of being all gung-ho about it and throw myself into the brick wall every single week.
The road is long and I'm glad, because — unlike sirpoc (unless something's changed since page 25) — I actually do enjoy running.
I'll share some more details about where I am, how I'm approaching this whole thing later on. For now I just wanted to say hello, and thanks for all the insight and inspiration.
Welcome back to running. If you're on Strava, I highly recommend checking out the Norwegian Singles Approach group there. A lot of good, focused discussion there. Good luck and have fun!
Now he's one of a kind, but it also goes to show the heights that this training can take you for the right kind of person. And it happens to work to great effect for most many other people as well. SirPoc might just be a super-responder though 😅
He still decidedly does not consider himself a runner nor a fan of running. 😂
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Sirpoc makes an appearance in Nick Besters London recap vid. I noticed because holy crap that cadence really is high 😆
The best part about him appearing in a Bester vid is firstly he smoked him and is undoubtedly smarter and the second part is I would imagine he has no idea or would even care who Bester is. Which would really annoy Bester, as sirpoc is this online myth of a character people root for and people just think Bester is a a-hole .
Sirpoc is the mysterious Ghost of Kyiv in the running world ;) Such high, high cadence at 8:40. It's cool to *run* the marathon on YouTube (6:20-7:00 segment) and see what Bester is doing from his POV. No snark...Bester may be a d1ck (I don't know either way, whatever) but he does a decent job with his videography.
Reddit guy needs to chill out a little bit. I think he's evangelizing about the approach too much. He did 3 of his own race reports, which were interesting and are the whole reason I looked into this thread, but he didn't need to make a post about sirpoc's own race result calling the marathon "solved".
I don't disagree the guy needs to chill. But the post I kinda agree with. If you are running 5-9 hours a week and it's a hobby, is there really probably a better one size fits all to train? I mean the main criticism was this wouldn't work for a marathon. That's out the window now as well. There has to be a point where with all the other evidence other than just sirpoc, points to the fact, if you are on hobby hours, would you not be stupid to at least try this approach for 6 months? This is someone who was an early skeptic of the thread .
Also, the cadence thing it's wild. And let's have no more Bester talk in this thread. Don't give him the attention the dbag wants.
I get why he did it, he was hoping to at least branch it out from just a "LRC thing only" to the wider community at AR. I don't even think RW or Citius has done a public piece on this training yet in terms of SINGLES. Using Sirpoc's training had good intent, it was the first time this was applied to a 26.2 build, rather than the 5k-13.1 normal NSM build.
Now he's one of a kind, but it also goes to show the heights that this training can take you for the right kind of person. And it happens to work to great effect for most many other people as well. SirPoc might just be a super-responder though 😅
He still decidedly does not consider himself a runner nor a fan of running. 😂
if he had a day off each week, he might enjoy running more. i find myself disliking training if i don't have a day off each week - i always take mondays off
Refuse to watch a Bester video, even if sirpoc is in it. Won't give him the clicks. Don't mind some of the YouTubers, route for FOD runner but Bester is a piece of work.
How much did sirpoc beat him by. I see the thread is running again I assume he did? Did he beat Felton as well? Harris Fry? I wondered before how he would fair against the YouTubers and shoetubers. Thought he might take scalps even though it's his first marathon. Felton even said something pretty dismissive about sirpoc training inadvertently I seem to remember from one of his videos about there is no such thing as NSM.
Can someone find the Felton clip? Interesting how that works--Bester ran 2:27, Felton ran 2:35 and sirpoc84 ran 2:24.
Wow who cares about Bester in the video, but damn sirpoc cadence is absolutely wild lol I mean you can read it but when you see it, insane. It sounds like someone tried to coach this out of him? Shows you that you just run, how you run. End of.
Also looks like he just have paced it well? Looks well back in the groups but ended up around 50th? Finally, how funny is it that Felton went to Kenya and he gets smoked by a vet on one run a day and about 70 ish miles peak who had a pint the day before and a mars bar as breakfast.
This is the shizzle im here for. Makes me dream that even without having all the privileges of a full time runner I could run 2:24 lol
I think that is why this thread is enduring--the 3:00 guy hopes to use this to get to 2:40, the 2:40 guy thinks he can get to 2:30. And better yet, it's a method that *knock on wood* could be injury-proof. No more dicking around with VO2 sprints, Jack's weird I/R/T/E system, or weird mid-week backbreaking runs (14 MP on Wednesday) from Uncle Pete, etc.
Hansons has some workout ideas that could fit in with sirpoc but I like how they keep the LR at 16 miles, and teach you fatigue. That is the strength of that program.
2:24 isn't even impressive even for a master. So why bother training to boring to be miserable. Maybe if it was a truly great time it would be worth it? This is not a rare feat even for a master
He finished what, 50 something in one of the major marathons? Must be easily top 10 in age group if not more?
What percentage of guys over 40 have ran 2:24 in their first ever marathon? This is including all the YouTubers crying tears about how bad the conditions were. Even Lexel knew it was going to be impressive despite others making ridiculous claims about not breaking 2:35.
The trolls had their time. But there isn't even anything here for you now. It's over.
When even Lexel is emerging from the cave after seeing shadows on the wall that's a game-changer...
That's the plan lol. I was just wondering if the long run approach was obviously stupid and I was doomed for failure. I'm finding myself more and more having to skip a second easy day though so come Monday I'll full commit to 4xMP (3s/km slower maybe?) + long run and check back in a bit. One caveat though, I've only been doing NSA for 5 months now, coming from a relatively untrained base so I'm still progressing quite a bit. I won't be able to compare to some baseline but I can let you know if I keep progressing or get injured.
Doing it for the odd week here and there 5 times a week cycling (relatively risk free) is one thing.....actually not having your body fall apart running is another altogether. Again, the whole reason what I do works, is likely because it takes out the high tariff of all the stress that builds up and builds up until it overflows and you blow up.
But as i said, on paper it's probably even better if you are extra time crunched or just don't want to run everyday. But there is a big difference to what works on paper and what works in the real world. In fact what looks like a good idea on paper actually ends up having it's flaws in the only thing that actually makes running special, the impact on the body.
You had mentioned 2-3 pages back you didn't like running at times? Is it the monotony of this singles method or the long cycle or neither? I think it'd be cool to see the year-over-year progress due to the nature of this interesting, albeit rigid, system and that would motivate me. Feel free to correct me or clarify...
I mean the thread almost seems made up. First marathon, 7-8 hours average a week with a peak week of 120km. 41 years old. Cadence of about 350. Pint the day before and mars bars for breakfast and runs 2:24 and is probably in the pub whilst Felton is still jogging it in whilst refusing to believe this training method is a thing.
No wonder this dude is literally the hobby joggers working class hero. We need 'Do the sirpoopy shuffle" t shirts. But the that's the best thing about this dude, he isn't trying to sell us sh*t.
Brian Sell was a great working class runner hero back in the day, but I think his training was more traditional Vo2Max workouts with LRs. I remember being on here in 2008-2010 and reading threads about him.
Same with Nate Pennington, the Army WCAP dude who came out of nowhere and ran 2:19.
I'd also love to see how much of what sirpoc does interfaces with the long-standing Canova principles (i.e. Canova for beginners).
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