Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Asked and answered, can you run three session + a long run every week for 2 year without a break?

yes, fantastic your CTL and performance will improve , if no it’s lower performance than you could have done.

Think - what will give me the most load every day, week, month, quarter, year, decade, etc. where I can continue to improve performance

You've got 5-8h to run during the week, which is the whole premise of this method, don't you?

If your training is important to you, as it is to me, you can find the time to do some modicum amount of research about it. As did I.

Otherwise you're just asking people to do the work for you.

But why would 3x2 miles at 6:25-6:41 give more load than 1 hour at 6:40 for a sub 3 marathoner?

Maybe I am misunderstanding. Maybe you need to get really close, but just under threshold for this to work. If that is true then the lactrace calculator is wrong.

It doesn't? Who on earth would think it does? It's hard to tell if you are trolling or not?

What are you going to do, run that workout 3 times a week? Even twice I would suggest on limited training hours a week would be next to impossible over a long period of time.

Maybe I've been lured into a troll reply.

For me 1 hour at MP is easier than 3x2 miles at the other pace.

3x2 at 6:40 harder than 1h at 6:40??

Son, you high? 60 mins MP straight at 6:40 is easier than the range you just have given? Even though the top end up your 2 mile repeats example are at 6:41?

Submit yourself for drug abuse testing boy, you high as a kite.

I'd recommend reading through this for others too. 10 or 20 pages at a time or so. You'll find that there are huge chunks you can skip (half of this thread is either some wizard claiming how inefficient this is or coggan and lexel going at it). But there are some really great posts too. Lots of awesome testimonies from folks who have tried this out sprinkled throughout

Totally agree. Reading through the thread is underrated.

For anyone who hasn't, I would recommend:

Obviously reading posts from sirpoc84. Goes without saying. But also pay close attention in the early days as you scan through to:

Hard2find

Shirtboy

Jiggymesiter

Chillruns, more recently.

Maybe I'll be downvoted, but when Coggan acts reasonable I think he's great and often shares some nice stuff.

But I add my name to the list who would happily pay £10-15 for a book with it all neatly in one place, covering a mixture of how it all came about , the theory and maybe some new bits I'm sure he has stuck up his sleeve for such eventualities.

It would be a pretty unique training book, hopefully kept in the spirit and style of the thread. If nothing else the guy deserves it for beer money and mars bars.

It doesn't give more load but it should reduce recovery time so that you can more easily (and more importantly more consistently) do it all again in 2 days. That seems you up for higher load over the long term.

rolling hills and humidity, should I stick to "slowest" rep time for each interval according to the Norwegian singles training calculator?

What is sirpoc's max HR? Looks like a lot of his subT work he hits roughly 177bpm, and his highest max HR from recent race results puts him at 191 max HR, so he's hitting just under 93% max HR in his subT work. Would us mere mortals be okay hitting 92% during the last rep, as long as we keep HR 65%-70% on the easy days and LR days?

I would like to thank everyone in that post. I’m a lurker since few months and I’m about to start NSM after my 5k in a month.

I have few questions.

I got two activities with the same load (calculated by Intervals ICU) but they are really different sessions.

Activity 1 : Easy run
Time : 56:04
Distance : 10,04 km
Load : 51
TRIMP : 83
Pace : 5:35/km
GAP : 4:54/min
RPE : 2

Activity 2 : 5k specific : 6*800
Time : 55:11
Distance : 10,66 km
Load : 51
TRIMP : 95
Pace : 5:11/km
GAP : 4:51/min
RPE : 8
15 min warm up at 5:25/km
6*800 at 3:14/km (80’’ rest)
11 cool down at 5:37/km
I lost about 10 minutes in that activity to pee, change shoes, do skips and 3 strides.

When I saw that I asked myself “wtf ? Is load equal to distance or time whatever the pace ?”.
I know that’s a dumb question, 1 hour at threshold doesn’t give the same load as 1 hour easy jog.

So I exported my data from Intervals and I got interesting results.
Those data are from a classic marathon plan (26 weeks, from october to april 2025). I did a VO2 block, a threshold block and a marathon specific block. 82k m average in the last 12 weeks, peak at 100km for 8 hours (that’s why I’m here, 8 hour is my limit).

What I got from those data : load = distance = time (R²=0,968 for load/distance and 0,946 for load/time). Wtf ?

1 .The two activities have the same load. Is that normal ? (my FTP seems correct, it’s my training threshold pace) Does the lost 10 min affect the total load ? Do I need to pee myself ?

2. In that plan I got 32 activities from 102 to 197 load which, from what I know, is impossible. My marathon is 263. Is my data not reliable ?

Sure, if you can recover from it week in and week out then why not. People get a bit hung up on copying sirpocs sessions exactly - he iterated to them as they worked for him based initially off the sessions KI was doing. The main goal is to build CTL in a sustainable way. If you find an hour of work at sub-sub threshold gets the same or more load for lower recovery cost then go for it. Or it may be that you just switch it in now and then to add variety and have fun. The template given however is pretty foolproof.

Yes, I think if you roughly stick into the framework of sirpoc template and you are a hobby jogger, that there is a very good chance you picked the best way to train.

If I could advise anyone to pick a random training plan in the hope it would be optimal, it's not even controversial at this point to suggest this would be top of the list . If nothing else it will teach you about what consistency is.

If you look at the plethora of people at a wide range of abilities, that are all improving on hobby hours after a period of no progress, it's hard to make a case for anything else being a better option. There's a reason why this thread will probably never die, because it's probably the biggest resource to an average hobby runner on the internet.

It's not the magic pill, but it's the best structure to a hobby jogger training I've probably ever seen, if you are willing to run almost everyday and make the most of that on singles.

Since this method involves no V02 max workouts, did people find they got slower before they got faster?

For example before I would do 400s at 5:40 pace but now I am doing 2 mile repeats at 6:25 pace. It still feels like work however.

You are a legend!

Yeah I was wondering the same thing. I feel significantly more fit than I did at my last 5k two months ago (ran a pb) but I ran 20s slower today (felt no pop in my legs). I think the removal of specific work (I dropped strides and 200m repeats) may have caused my shorter distance times to slow down in the short term, but I believe that this work is laying the foundation so that I can eventually run way faster either with just a little bit of sharpening or by brute forcing with raw fitness.

Just about everyone , which is a lot, who I have seen successfully implement this have all said the same. Probably not a lot happened, maybe they even got worse and then suddenly around 2-3 months in all hell breaks loose and suddenly you just will do a huge PB.

Definitely put me in that block. I remember being 6-7 weeks and thinking how dumb it was that I got lured in by a scam.

Then I ran a 5k and PBd by around 28 seconds even though the run felt truly terrible and I didn't think I was moving fast. This was week 9 I think of 9 straight weeks, 3 workouts a week, no days off.