Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

I used to use stryd. Actually use it less now training like this. Pace I actually find a bit easier to dial in.

You make some nice points though. I think this is why stryd is so devisive. It works for some, terrible for others. It should just 'work'. But it doesn't. That's the difference I think. With power meters for the bike, you just don't hear this kind of debate. 99% of the time, it just works. Obviously we are miles away for that when it comes to running power.

Wind has always been impactful on stryd power. Even the old summit (non-wind), I would get large power spikes in gusty conditions. I skipped the initial wind version. The next gen version is far better at sensing wind, in my experience. And yes, stryd is motion capture converted to power (maybe based on Di Prampero). If you understand that terrain is not accounted for directly (RE will show terrain), and some other caveats, it’s a robust device. I have used it in conjunction with metabolic testing for 5 years now.

I have not had your experience with changing shoes.

I have a hub PM, spider PM, pedals PM, left-only stages all on my bike. And I ran those concurrently with a Computrainer lab. My meters are all good because I did hill tests and static load tests to verify my equipment.

I must have a unique experience with Stryd. Power is very much inline with my RPE. I have done races and TTs from 400m to 20 miles, trail runs at 10000-14000 ft elevation, and all kinds of other efforts in various conditions.

Lastly, workout scoring and PMC is a no-brainer with Stryd. I get it…if your device doesn’t seem reliable, then you won’t be confident in it.

I have 30 years of experience with complex lab equipment and other sensors/detection devices. Stryd still took me a little while to master.

It's great to see so many people discussing their running journeys and sharing tips. It's inspiring to hear about everyone's training and goals. Keep up the great work, everyone!

The only bugs I've encountered are analysis-type bugs in the PowerCenter web interface, which I have reported and they've fixed. I have not seen any bugs in the pod's firmware that would indicate it's an unreliable product.

The trouble with relying on GPS is getting reliable pacing when in metro cities, tree cover, or even heavy cloudy days. Getting pace from the pod is immensely more reliable and responsive.

I see this come up from time-to-time and it just hasn't been my experience. I have worn my Stryd pod on maximal shoes, rockers, carbon-plate super shoes, and minimalist shoes across a few different brands over the years. The number reported to my watch just doesn't change significantly enough for me to alter my training, if I notice it at all.

Regarding the wind meter, according to their white paper, while running outside, they collected data with an anemometer connected to the brim of a baseball cap and compared that to the wind data the pod was collecting at the foot. Knowing the height and weight of the runner, which is setup in the account, they know roughly the body shape of the runner and the resistances they'll face at the head, chest, hips, legs, and feet. The firmware accounts from this and gets very reliable results.

With that said, I've run in very strong cross winds where the watts on my watch spiked well beyond what I felt I was doing in the moment. I suspect the firmware can only account for more "normal" and "expected" breezes/winds, but loses reliability in the extremes.

It's my understand that their power calculation for hills is the same. It's great for the shallower < 6% grades, but when the climbing gets steep, the numbers get "fudged" as the running form changes and the way the pod interacts with the ground forces is not the same as on the flats.

Stryd taught me how to truly segment out my different race efforts. I had rough ideas of what they were following Daniels VDOT, but Stryd really locked them in rather precisely for me.

It probably took me 2-3 years though to really trust it enough to execute power-based workouts with the expectation of improvement. I still haven't run a race strictly by power, but I plan on doing exactly that at Chicago.

Regarding NSM, I think Stryd (or the power meter in your watch, whatever works) is situated to be a decent proxy for lactate testing. If you have a valid CP, then it's roughly equivalent to your LT2 (CP might be a bit higher depending on how you tested). So keeping all your sub-T workouts in the ~85-95% CP range will likely be hitting the right lactate states correctly.

As regards to your first point, the fact it comes up regular is the problem. It should work 100% of the time, I don't even agree with the guy who said 99% of the time. The fact we are all having the back and forth shows how limited it is. It works for some people, doesn't for others. Nothing wrong with that, but also makes it surely the least reliable metric to rely on, when it comes to this thread. Obviously it's useful for some people, but I think for those that it does work for have tunnel vision and just aren't listening to the vast majority who have tried stryd and think it sucks compared to a usual power meter.

You are a fan of the product, I get that. But if you re-read your post it is actually really pointing out the massive flaws in it as a power meter. You shouldn't have to have to worry about winds, crosswinds, steep hills. A proper power meter would work in all of that. I do totally get that it's cool if you can make use of it, but just about everyone in this thread who has made use of it, has had to with hard work to make it useful, or using it with flaws.

The whole idea of this method is to keep it simple and plug and play. Which it is. Doing maths out on my run because it's windy or I'm running in strong crosswinds or because the gradient is steep is kinda ridiculous, tbh.

Not a bad post. I probably sit somewhere around this. When it works, it looks great for some people. But when it doesn't work, it's so frustrating. Actually, going back to cycling for the first time in 8 years and really enjoying it, has made me realise how easy training is given reliable power.

I do agree cycling power meters can have flaws as others have pointed out, but even the worst I've ever used is steets ahead of a anything running has to offer. When I found a good one , it was such a powerful tool working for me. I did not just utilise it for my training, but it's so repeatably accurate even a simpleton like me and use it to aerolab rides to optimise me on a second front.

When I think of running power, I always see myself trying to work around it, or make it work better, rather than it working for me. Even the headache of accounting for environmental factors that affect pace before my run is less annoying than trying to make my Stryd make sense.

I still hope a better product comes out one day. I know I've said it before but I doubt there's anyone on the planet who is rooting for a reliable and repeatable running power metric more than me.

There's no doubt some people find it useful though. So it's definitely worth it's place in talking about in the thread for some.

It’s a bummer that it doesn’t seem to work for you. The power data from Stryd have been just as reliable and useful to me as my Assiomas, PT hub, and NGEco in cycling.

Im not sure why I don’t experience the problems others face. I have two next gen’s recording on different watches and they’re mostly within 1% power and distance. Even comparing my next gen to a non-wind, they are about 1% different when discounting air power.

Guess I’m lucky.

Sorry to go off topic. The NS method - is it effective for a marathon?

I'm a 45 yr male, with marathon PB 2:36 last year off very little mileage due to being injury prone. In the past I've trained off Daniels, Hudson, Hanons and recently Karp.

Yes, provided you have an aerobic base (your 2:36 suggests you do), a sound understanding of how to train using this method, and acknowledge that modifying the method for the marathon is not sustainable long-term.

See reply #6767 on Page 339.

A couple of quick queries.

Super shoes for the S/T sessions, yes or no?

is everyone using the std rest intervals? 3 mins/1 min, 6 mins/90 secs, 10 mins/2 mins?

Does everyone find the 3 sessions roughly the same, in terms of fatigue, average HR, max HR, etc?

Yes-ish to the super shoes. I use the Saucony endorphin speed 4 for ST, and the only super shoe I’ve run in is the endorphin pro 2 that I use for races. Not everyone uses the standard rest intervals (a lot of people are committed to 1min no matter what), but I use them and see no need to change. Works well for me.

Strangely, since I’ve always been very aerobically underdeveloped and enjoy faster work, I find the 3min intervals slightly more taxing and usually get closer to/just over LTHR than the 6min or 10min intervals. Then for 10min intervals, I often max out ~5 beats below. With those, I do notice a big drop in HR at around 65-70sec recovery, which likely explains the difference. It’s all in the same ballpark, though.

Sometimes super shoes. I like them for shorter/faster reps (1000m) because they're closer to race paces and those lighter shoes turn over better for me. For longer (i.e. 3k / 2mi) I just use my trainers (Pegasus).

I vary my intervals - longer for longer reps, or sometimes a bit longer if the weather is warmer (we often 80 degrees F / 74 dew point mornings here). Normally 60" for the 1k, 75-90" for ~2k, 2' for 3k/2mi.

Yes fatigue is about the same across all three if the total rep volume is the same (I stick to around 6-7k of reps most workouts regardless of interval length). Though the weather can take a bit more out of me if it's a warmer morning.

- EVO SL, not sure if they're super shoes or not. They have a shank, but no plate, but do have super foam, if that's a thing.

- winter I did 60 sec breaks. Summer I did 60, 75, 90 sec breaks due to heat. Sirpoc posted yesterday on reddit about this & said he's been doing 2 min breaks for longer reps for awhile because that's how long it takes to cross 2 roads. I found that hilarious that we (I include myself) are overanalyzing rest breaks while he's just doing that length because of time needed to cross a road.

- Sessions feel about the same. Maybe a little more tired/sore by the end of the shorter repeats workout.

I'm a survey engineer and know pretty well how to measure things. My conclusion is that the latest watches are pretty close to Stryd, but stryd always wins. I live on a flat island with lot of vegetation that interfears with GPS signal. Its not that great to get pace from GPS, stryd does it way better.

This is my experience as well. My Coros Pace 2 almost always shows the same distance as Stryd because I have pretty open skies, even in my hilly area. Still, I’d rather not worry about signal loss under bridges or the odd obstruction.

What people don’t understand is that on flat, solid ground, stryd only makes analysis easier (IMO). Pace analysis would be very similar. However, I can’t run 500 feet without encountering hills and undulating terrain. Pace becomes almost useless unless you calculate a normalize graded pace, or somehow account for the vertical work component. Stryds model does this very well up to about 20-22% grade in my experience.

Just an example, I did a trail run starting at 9,500 ft and ending at 13,500 feet. I maintained a constant effort, and the power decline vs elevation gain was textbook.

I wouldn’t train and run without one now.

You got a ton of downvotes because every couple of pages someone who hasn't taken days out of their life to read the entire thread pops in to ask about how this applies to the marathon, a topic which has been discussed extensively (especially this year thanks to sirpoc's marathon debut). Don't take it personally.

I ran my marathon PB 2:38 last year on a 16 week block of 38 mpw avg, 46 peak (had been doing even less mileage and fewer workouts previous to that). My advice is that this method can't magically make you handle a larger training load than you're capable of handling. Don't view it as a way to do mileage that you haven't been able to do before.

There's nothing magical about the ~30mins of subt time that the standard workouts contain (ie 10 x 3min, 5 x 6min, 3 x 10min). You can start with less and that's productive. Aiming for 20-25min is totally fine. 7-8 x 3min. 4 x 6min. 2 x 10-12min.

Or you can stick to the 30mins now but you really ought to target the slowest paces on lactrace. So for your 2:36 (and maybe you're fitter or you've lost some fitness since then, I don't know), you'd be looking at 5:50, 5:57, and 6:06 for 3min, 6min, and 10min reps. These paces get you above LT1, not near LT2 like we ideally want. But it's about what your legs can handle and what training load you can recover from, which might mean we're not mechanically capable of hitting the ideal metabolic training (yet!). So we "train to train" to get our legs used to the weekly structure and over time we can handle getting closer to LT2.

I personally found that doing as little warmup and cooldown as possible is helpful. For example, you might do 10 x 3min but the first 2-3 reps are essentially warmup. And you'd do maybe a half mile jog before launching into 10 x 3min. No cooldown.

One other option is to occasionally plan a harder day where you're going to do 30mins of subt and target being closer to LT2 than LT1, but then you take an extra day of easy running before you do another session. I wouldn't make the day after the harder session shorter or take it off. You want to practice running the next day to get used to it.

Also beware of the long run. For some people it's not that fatiguing, but for some of us it can be (even when we're going slow). If your normal easy days are only 30-40 mins, then your "long run" doesn't need to be more than 60mins at first. Sounds ridiculous that a 2:3x marathoner can't jog more than 60mins without consequences, but it's the truth for some of us. Again, the training load we can handle has almost nothing to do with our race performance. So be honest about where you're at with training load and you will be able to increase it over time. If science says the benefits of a long run kick in more at 90mins and longer, then that's just too bad for us right now. We don't get those benefits until our legs can handle the load.

The important thing is to find a starting place that you can handle and have patience building from there. Ultimately though, people doing this method like to do harder and longer workouts for a few weeks preceding the taper for a marathon, so they don't follow this method exactly all the way through. But does the method build a ton of fitness relevant to the marathon? Obviously yes. Sirpoc started as a 20min+ 5k guy and did this method for years, raced mostly 5k's, and did only a handful of workouts that aren't prescribed in this method (but aren't even that different or extreme), and ran a 2:24 marathon. So obviously 99% of that ability to run a marathon was from this method. The few special workouts could not have been more than a cherry on top.

The majority of his pre-marathon training was business as usual. Over a 14 week period, he did 8 sessions that were 12-15k in volume rather than the typical 10k of volume. Those consisted of 4 x 3k or 3 x 5k. He did two even longer sessions: 4 x 5k and 5 x 5k. He had one 24k progressive run with the first 16k at ~93% MP and the last 8k at MP. He did two medium-long runs with a continuous 10k subt embedded in one and 3 x 3k subt w/ 1k float embedded in the other. He raced a HM. And he increased his long run up to a peak of 2h23m by adding a bit on each week. But he also noted that this training wasn't sustainable so it was more of a traditional "briefly overtrain then recover with a taper". But I imagine that applies just to the last few weeks where he raced the HM and then did two weeks in a row consisting of two of those bigger volume sessions. The other ~11 weeks I imagine were pretty sustainable despite some 12-15k sessions and the slowly increasing long runs.

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sirpoc Marathon Build

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