Back again and ready to share some details and reflections on how I will be adopting sirpoc's Norwegian Singles. Even though the big man himself seems to be moving beyond the system that took him to such great heights ;)
I'm now about fifty pages into the thread, and I've gone through lots of discussions in adjacent forums like the Strava group, reddit and more. I think I have a fairly decent understanding of the approach and its fundamental principles. Right now, I would say I am in a "calibration phase". It's been almost two years since I last trained with any sort of structure, so I don't just want to jump head first back in and risk making all the same mistakes once more.
To that end, my goal for the past and coming few weeks is to get a good feel for stuff like:
- Where is my fitness at the moment?
- What kind of training load can I "sustain indefinitely" at my current fitness level?
- What's the correct intensity for my workouts
- How can I best measure and quantify my training load
And I've found some answers to these questions.
Based on the workouts I've done the last few weeks, I think my fitness is probably around a vdot level of 55. I probably don't have the muscular endurance to run a half or full marathon at that level, but I'm fairly confident that I could sneak under 38 minutes for the 10k and maybe even under 18 minutes for 5k. A little depressing, as I spent my last few years of training trying to get under 34 minutes for the 10k, and lower my half and marathon PBs of 1:15 and 2:39.
But it is what it is! And I'm excited to see if this approach might get me back to similar levels within a couple of years. Either way, I'm convinced it will be a far more sustainable and more enjoyable approach to training.
Since starting to investigate this approach a few weeks back, I've generally done two workouts per week. And I've tried to keep it below or "sub" threshold. To keep pushing that threshold up from below. In my previous life as a runner, I always ran with a HR strap and used HR actively during my sessions. So I have a decent feel for where my threshold is, in terms of setting an upper limit, and how my heart rate should progress throughout the various sessions.
(Side note: It never ceases to amaze me how low you should be during the first few reps of a 1k reps session to come in at the right level towards the middle and end!)
That in mind, plus the fact that I know both pace and power will be moving targets in the coming months, I've landed on using HRSS to quantify my training load. I've gone back and forth on this a lot. Pace and power load calculations are more or less identical in terms of load/minute on easy versus quality, with an average multiplier of about 1.4x for quality sessions versus easy runs. For HR load, I'm seeing a multiplier of 1.8x, which means it significantly overvalues intensity compared to the two other metrics.
The reason I'm sticking with HR though, in addition to what I mentioned above, is that I do a fair bit of running on the treadmill in the winter months. On my cheap home tread, perceived effort completely decouples from pace and power reported by my footpod. HR feels a far more accurate representation of my effort levels here. So to maintain consistency throughout the year, I'm using HR. I suspect that, as long as I keep my threshold pace and FTP/CP up to date, it won't matter too much and I'll see roughly the same trends — as many people have alluded to throughout the thread. Nevertheless, as you can tell, I've spent way too much time thinking about this and landed on the solution I think offers the most consistency.
As for training load, it's hard to say. I've been at around 60 kilometres (37 miles) the last few weeks, and hovered at 40 km / 25 miles for a couple of months before that. Some of the workouts were a bit harder than I'll do in the future, though, and the long run definitely was. Given my past mileage, I think I should be OK to jump "straight in" and aim for about 6-7 hours per week with three workouts from here. It will probably bring me to 70 or 80 kilometres (45-50 miles) per week tops. I'll give it a shot and see how it goes! The first couple of weeks, I'll probably keep each sub-threshold session at 20-25 minutes and then gradually increase it towards 25% of my weekly total (as measured by heart rate time in zones).
For the workouts, I've been testing the waters in the last couple of weeks. I'm fairly confident that my upper threshold limit is around 180 bpm, so I've set 175 as my upper limit for these workouts. With all this talk about how controlled these workouts are, it kinda caught me by surprise how hard I actually work to get and stay in that range. It's probably that I'm no longer accustomed to grinding out these kinds of workouts anymore more than anything else, though.
As a side note, I've probably always done my rep sessions more or less within this framework. Although on a good day I'd definitely blow right by that 175 bpm "speed limit". It's a very enjoyable way of doing workouts, compared to long tempos and hard long runs (the combination of which is probably what took the life out of me a couple of years back.)
To ensure that my estimates with regards to HR and, to some extent, paces and power values, are not way off target these days, I've borrowed a Lactate Pro 2 and bought a set of strips. (Wow, the prices have become insane! I definitely won't be testing very much once I've gone through each of the "basic" sessions and calibrated myself with testing.)
Did my first session with testing this morning, and was right in the range I wanted clocking in at 2.1 mmol after averaging 164 and 166 bpm respectively and peaking at 173 bpm for both. As only did 6 x 1000m, I think that will put my right in the range once I increase to 8 and eventually 10 reps. That was running 3:50s for the last reps (ran slightly progressive) which makes me even more confident in that fitness estimate of a vdot around 55.
Once I find my legs in this system, I'll throw in a 5k time trial (or even race) to get some definitive answers. And, given sirpoc's success with regular racing, I'll try to incorporate something similar every 4 weeks or so.
So, that's where I'm at. Will be sharing more updates as I get into the groove of things.
