The never ending debate - singles or doubles?

Well, you are well known here malmo for mainly one thing, you reject the over a long time experienced knowledge by others when they do not match your own... 😉

I have never told here that doubles and high mileage don't function. How could I do that when the vast majority of elite top runners have succeed with that? My for long time experienced knowledge is different from yours in the meaning I know how to create excellent running performances on both high and low mileage.

My participation here as you so condescending choose to call " vandalism" just have the mission to show on there is another way of training that is at least as effective as the high mileage doubling way.

The special thread you talk about was over 7000 posts and interested many readers here to follow but it got deleted by " some/ or someone" in the staff.....😉

This is my philosophy mostly. Under 70'/day is probably best as a single. Whether. I double on a run over 70' depends on how I'm feeling. I actually find that doing a long slow single of ~80 after a workout feels better than a double of 50/30 or something like that. Unless it's a long run, anything over 90' should definitely be a double. My typical off-day volume is 60-90 and I mostly do it in singles unless there are time constraints or there's a practicality to it.

Why? If I'm sore or a little injured I feel mechanically bad for the first mile or so at least. This is true whether I do two runs or one. So if I double, I end up doing more mileage in that crappy mechanical feel zone. I don't want to promote that so I don't double if that's the case.

The other aspect of my preference for singles is that having some route variety. I get bored of the areas near my house where all my routes converge. If I do shorter runs I will be stuck in the boring area near my place.

I'm not a morning runner, so if I double it'll be a late morning/lunch hour + evening run, or it will be a run-commute. What I used to do a lot was take the subway to work in the morning, run for 50' at lunch, then run part-way home for 30-35' and take the subway the rest of the way home. Other times (different work location) I'd run commute both ways (35') and add-on on the way home to bump up the volume as needed. I liked doing this because it reduced the time footprint running took out of my life since I was repurposing time that would be otherwise wasted doing nothing.

Triples - 10 miles morning ; afternoon ; evening.

Hello Cam Levins.

I used to run doubles and some week as much as 180 miles.I couldn't see any improvement at one point in my running career and decided to switch to low volume and only singles. From that day my running results just improved amazingly.. Singles is the way to go but the majority of coaches and runners don't know about this and don't have the knowledge how to perform it excellent and effective.

Well, I will give my quite qualificated guess from have coached all levels of runners during now eight years and experience from my own running career as a national elite runner. A runner can only reach his/her individual optimal aerob capacity . Everyone has a limit for it regardless how much mileage is done. At one point there comes a diminishing returns and there must be other main factors to emphasize for the result to keep on develop. This individual maximal aerob limit maybe can be reached faster by doing doubles, but it can also be reached by singles on relatively low volume. Infact my experience and knowledge from running and coaching during now over 50 years in practise points to that this individual aerob limit even seem to be faster reached by one session per day training. One of the causes to this, as I see it, must have something to do with increased continuity and less risk of injury when the runner gets `complete ` recovery between the daily single sessions. The key to individual success on singles is just to know how to most effective perform this low volume training.

Well...deciding that anything "is the way to go" for most based on your own experience is, uh..., not the way to go when there is a very substantial amount of information contradicting your experience. There's also only a very general and vague description that you're giving so I can't really say much about what you experienced or why. But I will say definitively that your experience at whatever volume you were at when when you switched to singles was a different experience than it would have been if you'd just run at that volume without ever having done doubles and as much as 180. Running big volume for a while and then doing noticeably lower volume can often produce excellent results.

Well, I did doubles and high volume many years with the traditional buildup and so on, then stopped to develop . Couldn't get out of that plateau until I changed to singles/ low volume.It was amazing how fast I started to run faster than ever after quite short time on only 50 to 55 mpw. The strange thing I just kept on improving with my singles and low volume and ran faster than ever at all distances from 5 k to the marathon and it continued several years after.I think it's like some here tells that most elite runners and sub elite just follow the majority stream of high mileage and doubles without knowing the power of singles and low volume. Of course high volume and doubles functions very good as well, but why run that much when no need for it to reach individual top results?

What about for Summer running? As someone who doesn’t tolerate hot weather well, I’m starting to think that two 1/2 hr runs might be better than one 1 hour.

I couldn't recommend that. Better to run 45min - 1 hour at a single run early in the morning before sunrise or if you are more of an afternoon/ evening runner make your single run just when sunset or right after. That will help alot.

This is of course not correct. As a very fresh example I have coached a now age 39 USA master runner a couple of years , Dallin Dyer, who trains 5-6 sessions per week and yesterday even ran faster at 1500m than he did as young . Placed 3rd in the USTAF age group 35-39 in a 4:17 ( about equal to a 4:33-4:34 mile. His lifetime best at the mile when younger a 4:36). He even told me he thought it felt his tank was far from empty and could have run around 4:10 with better pacing . If you have a coach like me who knows the best way to run on singles it`s even better than running doubles.You can check Dallin Dyer up at Strava( I`ve got his permission.... ) .

So he is correct. What Kvothe said was that there are exceptions.

Try to learn something.