Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

An easy long run as long (in minutes) as the goal race makes sense, but how would you adapt it if you're on the slower hobby-jogging side and hoping to run a marathon in 3-3:30 while sticking to this method? Cap it at 2.5 hours like Daniels or keep scaling up to get the body ready to spend that much time on feet (the load would be compensated by M pace being relatively less intense/further from LT for slower runners?)

I'm in that time range, first marathon last October being 3:20, my second marathon this year in April being 3:11.

For my April marathon my longest run was 2h 17m, maxing out at 27km, all at 'easy' effort.

For my October marathon I consistently hit 30km+, peaking at 36km, more often than not with some MP efforts thrown in.

I didn't hit a wall in my April marathon, and pace was relatively consistent all the way to the end: If I look at my 5k splits, there's only a difference of 1'30'' between the fastest and slowest.

I think a big part of it is that I was just generally fitter and more adapted to the abuse of running by virtue of having 6 months more running in my legs, but I think the key thing is that I felt I could just keep going with the training. For April I never felt overly fatigued whilst training, never felt the dread of a looming long run or killer workout coming up, and never felt as though I was nearing burnout, which is a stark contrast to last year when I couldn't wait for the peak weeks to be over. If anything I was mildly annoyed that I had to run a marathon and deal with the associated recovery and building myself back up again; I think I'd have rather continued training and building fitness.

That’s some really solid improvement. Thanks for the info. Average weekly mileage (or kilometerage?) for each of the two marathons? Over what length of time? Peak week for each?

Have you been doing this kind of training or following some other method(s)/plan(s)?If so, is that the same for both of the two marathons? How much running, and how serious was your training, before the build for your October marathon?

What was your pace like in the first one? Did you possibly misjudge your fitness and just go out too fast? (Even though it seems as though you point to overall training fatigue as an issue more than race plan/pace problems, I still wonder.)

I’m glad you didn’t high a wall and that you feel good about your pacing, but unless there were significant elevation differences, I wouldn’t quite go with “only” on the delta for the 5k splits in terms of desired consistency, but it definitely indicates doing a solid job of not hitting the wall.

Longtime reader no time commenter, thought I would jump in as I have recently implemented the system after a year of injuries.

Previous PBs are 34:48 in 10k and 9:29 in a 3000m both in a couple of months at the end of 2023, was doing 80 to 90km per week. Speed session tuesday, continuous hard tempo thursday, hard v02 saturday and a steady to fast long run on sunday. Have spent the last year completely injured, with tendentious and two stress fractures. The thing that started the injuries was one evening doing fast 200s on the track and my ankle blew up, then any time i tried to get back into training traditionally for a few weeks i would get injured again.

I started training again properly mid Feb and implemented this method. Generally hitting about 85 to 95 min threshold a week and peaking at 90km for a week. Two things of note is that I was doing 8x3min on tuesday, 6x6min on thursday and 3x12min on Saturday with little variance.

I ran a marathon last week in 2h 55min (4:09 min/km). I didn't run a single rep faster than 3:50 min/km or slower than 4:05 min/km. My longest run was 19km at 5:15 min/km.

Worth noting I split 1h 29min for the first half and 1h 26min for the second half (which was hillier).

That time is weaker than my other Pbs but i have felt so good training that I am super encouraged and can't wait to continue. Main goal now is a half marathon at the end of summer and a 10km in December.

Do you do cross? Also what region of TX? Missouri came to mind for me that have some pretty good D2 school that usually have some 800m studs

sirpoc - question about your shoes—what are you wearing on easy, subT, long run and race days? How many miles are you getting on each?

Race in Adidas Adios Pro 4s, and I believe he does workouts in Nike Zoom Fly 6 and maybe easy runs too.

Ha, you clearly don’t follow his Strava closely. No idea what he raced in but he’s bought literally every super shoe or super trainer and tries/rotates them all.

Swears by the Superblast iirc

His race shoe I discerned from his mini flick in Bester's London Marathon vid

I did follow his strava but he lowkey doesn't track his shoes on there ever and he just briefly mentioned how much he liked the Zoom Fly 6s but yeah Superblasts too. dk what he's using now.

I've been doing NSM workouts for 4-6 weeks regularly, so can't really comment regarding improvement yet.

I feel like I don't have quite the aerobic base to to take full advantage of these workouts. I seem to complete and recover from them well enough, with the exception that some of the faster reps (~ 3:00 intervals) my HR pushes a little beyond 90% MHR towards the final ~15 seconds.

I feel like doing a dedicated 3 month base-building block of just 70-80% MHR easy runs might help me more down the road. Any thoughts on the matter or does it all just boil down to CTL in the end?

Canova also starts with easy long run as long as the target time. They go into specific long runs only after that. However, his athletes are elites, all running close to 2 hours. In the context of Norwegian Singles, you have to run every run like you need to save your legs for the next session, too, so I'd cap it, like Daniels.

When I was training for my first full, aiming for 3:30 (blew it in 3:53 due to heat on race day), I've only run once for 3h30m as long run, only because my club run-mates were doing 32K and I needed 3.5 hours to complete it back then. I've got faster and faster after that and usually capped my run to 32-33K. I've done Hadd for a while and my 4 week cycle had long runs of 1h45m, 2h, 2h15m and 2h30m and I had very good results with it.

In my experience, legs don't struggle with going a little extra on race day. It's the mind you have to train, so don't be afraid to cap it at 32K or 2.5 hours, as long as your overall mileage and workouts are in place, and this plays nice with sirpoc's comments about reaching a high CTL for a PB, no matter how you reach that high CTL.

Probably a very stupid question but here it goes: would this type of training benefit me or would I be better off doing some faster work? I ask because my limiting factor is I can't go faster because I can't get enough air in, rather than my legs hurting. Even at the HM there is no pain in the legs beyond the fatigue I feel in my whole body in the last 1 or 2 km. On the other hand, if I try to go a bit faster, I simply run out of breath.

For reference my 10k PR is 48:15 and I focus on the 10k and HM.

Great work! I see we're coming from similar backgrounds and personal bests. You're a little ahead of me, and so it's encouraging to see other people in a similar boat as me finding success with this approach.

How have you been feeling throughout the weeks compared to your earlier approach?

That marathon time is solid, considering no "special block" to prepare for the distance. I'm sure if you went out and raced a shorter race, you'd be much closer to the fitness level of your PBs. And you're just getting started!

I don't think base building is necessary - NSM is base building. If you're recovering from the workouts, you're doing it right. Does it all boil down to CTL? For 99% of us hobby joggers, yes, that's pretty much it.

NSM is perfect for you.

If replacing one of the easy runs with a cycle, how long would the cycle have to be to equate to an easy run of 1 hour at 70% of max hr?

Maybe a third more?

I usually equate a 40 minute easy run to about a 60-70 minute easy ride, give or take.

Unless you are an experienced cyclist, you might want to scale the HR bpm equivalents as well. When i first started cycling everything was probably 10-15 bpm lower for cycling than for running at about the same intensity, with my MAX Cycling BPM being 10-13 bpm lower than my MAX running HR.

After a couple years of pretty consistent cycling with a lot of intensity thrown in, things seems to be 1:1.

I noticed several of your 1k sessions in your marathon run up you did as progressions and started at 3.10-3.15 then progressed down through to 3 mins per km and even 2.58 by the end of one with more like a 3.06 being the average. Was this just to get some extra top end work in the final weeks of the marathon build, or just loving it too much and getting excited? These would def be a 7+ for me fwiw, but then I'm not sirpoc!

it could be a combination of getting warmed up plus the effect of headwind vs tailwind in his route. I don't think Sirpoc ever gets too excited and over pushes it