Let's see the hard evidence of what works and what doesn't.
Everything else is heresay.
Lol the claim the guy didn't go from 20 to 17 in 7 months even came here and said his Strava is open and he has. There's multiple threads on Strava. Hundreds of performance gains. Nobody is dumb enough to dox themselves on LRC.
The guy did say "way too fast," but I wanted to know what they meant. Did they mean actually too fast, or just "this isn't in my plan" (i.e., it's 71% instead of 70%) fast?
I've read this whole thread (and spent hours distilling the posts/thoughts into a shorter document), and what I've noticed is that people are beating the crap out of a very simple idea. Here's the point, from the first page: "Because there is very little vo2 max stuff I pretty much am ready to go for the next session no problem."
The goal is to make sure you're ready for the next hard run: worrying about going two percent too fast on your in between days (or even actually doing it) isn't going to be the end of the world. But it will ruin the joy you can get from running. The training IS boring, and most days you WILL be a lone wolf, but that doesn't mean you can't be flexible. Going for one run with your mates is not going to ruin your overall progress.
I think personally it's about discipline. Of course if you go a touch too hard (and I think sirpoc has covered this many times) nothing bad is going to happen.
But if you start changing even the little things, you get into the territory of thinking "OK , let's see what we can also change or break this little rule over here". Then quite quickly you are straying further and further away from the focus of what you are trying to achieve. Not having discipline is really why a lot of training plans fail, not just this one.
I've improved my times as a runner using this method, but I'm also a much more focused, disciplined and purposeful runner. Maybe that is boring at times. That i do not and can't disagree with. But on the balance I think it's worth it, for the un-tick in results.
I don't find this approach boring at all. But then, I'm also a lone wolf by nature when it comes to training (not necessarily in life as a whole).
I have absolutely zero problems shuffling round-and-round the track at Sub-T, while at the same time the local club's training group are on the verge of puking their guts out from "seeing God" type workouts.
The track has one purpose for me and one purpose only. To get my workout done!
I don't talk to people, I don't pull out my phone, I don't waste any time (because guess what, as an adult hobby-jogger, I have no time to waste, because I have a life to live). I warm up, I run my Sub-T intervals, I cool down, and then I get the feck out of there.
My training has never been better than it is now and I'm loving every second of it.
Let's see the hard evidence of what works and what doesn't.
Everything else is heresay.
Do you think this is all made up? Why would so many people be lying on here? Those that have open Strava profiles have the proof. There have been train logs provided in here which are evidence enough
Time will tell, but I think sirpoc's most relevant legacy will what relates to to easy-days-easy, and less so about what he does on quality days.
I don't think it's that relevant if once in a while one swaps sirpoc's sub-T session of 10x1K (1' recovery) at sub-T pace for Daniel's typical interval session of 5x1K off 3' recovery, which btw is also meant to leave some fuel in the tank for 1-2 more quality sessions that week.
Time will tell, but I think sirpoc's most relevant legacy will what relates to to easy-days-easy, and less so about what he does on quality days.
I don't think it's that relevant if once in a while one swaps sirpoc's sub-T session of 10x1K (1' recovery) at sub-T pace for Daniel's typical interval session of 5x1K off 3' recovery, which btw is also meant to leave some fuel in the tank for 1-2 more quality sessions that week.
Isn't the point not to overcook yourself on the quality days and let the easy days be truly easy? If so, why wouldn't you have fuel in the tank for the next quality session?
Time will tell, but I think sirpoc's most relevant legacy will what relates to to easy-days-easy, and less so about what he does on quality days.
I don't think it's that relevant if once in a while one swaps sirpoc's sub-T session of 10x1K (1' recovery) at sub-T pace for Daniel's typical interval session of 5x1K off 3' recovery, which btw is also meant to leave some fuel in the tank for 1-2 more quality sessions that week.
Isn't the point not to overcook yourself on the quality days and let the easy days be truly easy? If so, why wouldn't you have fuel in the tank for the next quality session?
The trap in Daniels is thinking you can do 3 Quality sessions of his in a given week, even when you are younger.
If you are dropping a 5x1k at VO2 you better be changing the rest of your week appropriately and knowing why you are making that swap
The trap in Daniels is thinking you can do 3 Quality sessions of his in a given week, even when you are younger.
If you are dropping a 5x1k at VO2 you better be changing the rest of your week appropriately and knowing why you are making that swap
This guy is often the voice of reason here.
If I am dropping 5-6x1k I'm sure as not recovering enough to be able to drop into a sub threshold on good legs in 48 hours, on even a semi regular basis. Of course you can now and again, but the trap is being enticed into it, when you can replace it entirely with just pure sub threshold 3x a week and probably end up faster anyway.
What's the crazy Englishman on now? Someone did the calcs. It's something nuts like 120 straight weeks and climbing.
I mean realistically, it's that consistency that has got him faster. Rather than anything specific. Could he have replaced once a fortnight sub threshold session with 5-6x1k ~5k pace and still been as fast? Maybe. But I'm not even sure if he would have. Would the injury risk and accumulation of fatigue and load management disintegrated at some point? The answer might not be yes, but it's certainly likely, or at least more likely.
As above. If you are changing and diverging out from this format, you better have a pretty good reason for doing so. Everything tells us that the slow aggregation of load is trumping any short term rolling of the dice or adding in fast specificity just because we feel we have to, based on our core beliefs.
That fact seems pretty rigid and seems to have annoyed a lot of people, but for the hobby jogger it seems best to stick to it pretty rigidly, I don't see how that's really that hard to argue with at this point. It's more some people don't want to believe this is the case, more than anything else.
This all comes from someone who even 18 months ago was 100% sure Daniel's was the best plan for just about any hobby jogger. Until this thread.
The trap in Daniels is thinking you can do 3 Quality sessions of his in a given week, even when you are younger.
If you are dropping a 5x1k at VO2 you better be changing the rest of your week appropriately and knowing why you are making that swap
This guy is often the voice of reason here.
If I am dropping 5-6x1k I'm sure as not recovering enough to be able to drop into a sub threshold on good legs in 48 hours, on even a semi regular basis. Of course you can now and again, but the trap is being enticed into it, when you can replace it entirely with just pure sub threshold 3x a week and probably end up faster anyway.
What's the crazy Englishman on now? Someone did the calcs. It's something nuts like 120 straight weeks and climbing.
I mean realistically, it's that consistency that has got him faster. Rather than anything specific. Could he have replaced once a fortnight sub threshold session with 5-6x1k ~5k pace and still been as fast? Maybe. But I'm not even sure if he would have. Would the injury risk and accumulation of fatigue and load management disintegrated at some point? The answer might not be yes, but it's certainly likely, or at least more likely.
As above. If you are changing and diverging out from this format, you better have a pretty good reason for doing so. Everything tells us that the slow aggregation of load is trumping any short term rolling of the dice or adding in fast specificity just because we feel we have to, based on our core beliefs.
That fact seems pretty rigid and seems to have annoyed a lot of people, but for the hobby jogger it seems best to stick to it pretty rigidly, I don't see how that's really that hard to argue with at this point. It's more some people don't want to believe this is the case, more than anything else.
This all comes from someone who even 18 months ago was 100% sure Daniel's was the best plan for just about any hobby jogger. Until this thread.
100%
if you time horizon is short and youve done a good amount of sweetspot/sub threshold type base for a while, go nuts but you will run out of base and have to reset at some point
Actually funny enough, Coggan and Hunter Allen have a podcast somewhere talking about this very thing.
You can burn it up for a while when you have the platform, but eventually you have to get back to the basics.
So, an update after a year on NSA. I was in good shape last fall, but there were no local races. Then in January I got injured – not from overdoing it, but from trying to run a workout on a crowded indoor track with sharp turns and a lot of pace changes. I tweaked a calf, and it cost me a month. Then after some progress, I fell during a workout and had a nasty fatigue reaction and lost more time. After 3 months of mostly lousy training, I started over in mid-March with some ridiculously slow workouts (like 2 x 1 mile at slower than MP).
The thing is, even doing 3 ridiculous workouts a week gave me more average workout volume per week than any of my race buildups in the last 5 years. Those big workouts I was doing looked cool, but they were taking so much recovery at my age that my weekly training load was actually pretty low. After a week of doing ridiculously easy workouts, I was able to start increasing pace and volume and got up to 4 miles/workout before I decided I felt okay to try a 5K. (This is why I think it’s okay for beginners to start NSA at relatively low volumes – I’ve done it myself a few times.) The race went fine off of 3 weeks of training, although I ran slower than last summer when I started NSA, and it left only 7 weeks until my goal half marathon.
I switched some things around. I stopped lifting because it was keeping me from recovering completely. My form felt like garbage, so I added a few pre-workout strides that focused on arms, knee drive, glutes, and driving my feet into the ground (and it actually helped a lot). I switched to doing the same 3 workouts each week: 3 x 3200, 4-6 x 1 mile, and 7-10 x 1K.
That meant a HM build with relatively low mileage (47/week over the last 8 weeks, peak of 55), with just a couple of 13-milers for long runs and a “peak” workout of 3 x 2 miles at 6:36/mile, which honestly is kind of a joke. It was also my shallowest taper. Seeing the graph of sirpoc’s CTL vs. 5K times finally clicked for me, so instead of a last workout 12 days out and then tapering, I did regular workouts the week before race week. I did cut back mileage and workouts for race week, since I’m old and a HM is a long race.
The result was that I ran my goal half marathon in 1:22, averaging 6:17/mile (in Vaporflies), right on pace from mile 1, with miles 1-12 not varying more than a few seconds in either direction, and just slightly faster on mile 13. That seems like a pretty solid result for 10 weeks of training coming off of an injury. It’s the same time I ran in this race 2 years ago, but when you’re past 50, running the same time as 2 years ago is a victory. If you believe in age grading, it was my third best race ever. I’ve been training seriously as an adult for 10 years, so I can say that NSA is at least as good as anything else I’ve tried (and I've tried a lot of different things), and I’m sticking with it.
Now I’m experimenting with one change in my training. Before the HM, I was focusing on building workout volume, but I was up to 30% or more of weekly volume from sub-T workouts, and most of my paces ended up in the 20K-MP range to keep the stress manageable. Now I want to get closer to the standard NSA paces by cutting back on workout volume and progressively increasing pace within the workout. Lots of volume at 20K-MP may have worked for a HM, but I think I was missing some of the benefits by forcing the volume and sacrificing pace. In other words, just do what works for sirpoc.
7 months into this, training going well. Getting faster, but also fatter. How do I maintain or lose some extra weight?
Make sure you're fueled for workouts, but after that, there are no shortcuts beyond controlling portion sizes and avoiding drinking empty calories (from juice or soda). You can cut a lot of calories out of your diet without making huge changes just by taking a close look at where the calories are and reducing amounts.
7 months into this, training going well. Getting faster, but also fatter. How do I maintain or lose some extra weight?
Make sure you're fueled for workouts, but after that, there are no shortcuts beyond controlling portion sizes and avoiding drinking empty calories (from juice or soda). You can cut a lot of calories out of your diet without making huge changes just by taking a close look at where the calories are and reducing amounts.
Have read some folks really restrict calories but eat quite a bit right before every run, is this good or bad advice?
7 months into this, training going well. Getting faster, but also fatter. How do I maintain or lose some extra weight?
Yeah, honestly it's hard for me to maintain a caloric deficit with this training. I am always hungry. Would love to hear other's thoughts on how to handle this.
When you start eating less you will feel hungry but over time your appetite adjusts I’ve found. I went from 70 plus grams carbs to 5o grams carbs each meal