For mid distance runners using NSA to increase aerobic capacity while not losing speed - what are speed workouts that won’t cause anaerobic lactate levels that would harm aerobic development?
Also strides 2-3 days per week are a great way too
This chart provides a general overview of the optimal distances, intensity, rest, progression, and daily training loads for developing the different components of speed, speed endurance, special endurance and tempo running.
Its documented in this thread multiple times, Reddit and the lactate websites.
basic workouts
10 x 3 mins around 1 hour race pace
5 x 6 mins or 6 x 5mins between 1:15-1:30 hour pace
3 x 10 mins between 1:45 and 2:00 hour race pace
3-5 x 15 mins between your marathon pace
all other runs easy and a slightly longer easy run.
recovery is 1-2 mins walking/jogging/having a pint. It started at 1 min for the 3min reps and longer because sirpoc had to cross busy roads and everyone copied but 60 seconds should be fine.
all you are trying to do is maximise time (load) between LT1 and LT2 while trying to minimise fatigue (load) from your easy roads so you can consistently run every day for 3 years+ and steadily improve aerobically.
As for most of us, needing a sprint finish “to place” is of little to no value compared to being able to have a faster average pace for the entire race.
Its documented in this thread multiple times, Reddit and the lactate websites.
basic workouts
10 x 3 mins around 1 hour race pace
5 x 6 mins or 6 x 5mins between 1:15-1:30 hour pace
3 x 10 mins between 1:45 and 2:00 hour race pace
3-5 x 15 mins between your marathon pace
all other runs easy and a slightly longer easy run.
recovery is 1-2 mins walking/jogging/having a pint. It started at 1 min for the 3min reps and longer because sirpoc had to cross busy roads and everyone copied but 60 seconds should be fine.
all you are trying to do is maximise time (load) between LT1 and LT2 while trying to minimise fatigue (load) from your easy roads so you can consistently run every day for 3 years+ and steadily improve aerobically.
As for most of us, needing a sprint finish “to place” is of little to no value compared to being able to have a faster average pace for the entire race.
People don't want this. 3 years? Consistency? They want to do the "special" block for a few weeks and run a 2:20! Quick fixes and magic wands only please
in Sirpoc’s training sessions, can you explain, relative to the marathon pace, at what pace he ran the 1000 m / 2000 m / 3200 m / 5000 m intervals? Thank you. I mean specifically for the interval workouts, and how the rest periods between intervals were structured — walking, etc... what was the duration of the rests?
I see 5k at Marathon Pace with 2'30'' walking rest, but i can't find the other.
Relative to Marathon pace, all intervals were faster.
The structure of the rest periods was to reduce the intensity from the interval very substantially (so relative to Marathon pace, it was slower).
The duration was anywhere from 0.0001903% of a year (0.0001897% if it's a leap year) to about 3x of that.
Something that was mentioned a few pages back and seems quite common when people are struggling with the method is related to the increase in load. If you’re not already training a decent amount and you jump into this, you’ll likely struggle.
Is there a recommendation for how to start? I.e. get to X number of hours running per week, then add one workout or two, do that for a few weeks, then add the third. Is it better to start with 2 x 30 minute sub-t workouts? 3 x 20?
Something that was mentioned a few pages back and seems quite common when people are struggling with the method is related to the increase in load. If you’re not already training a decent amount and you jump into this, you’ll likely struggle.
Is there a recommendation for how to start? I.e. get to X number of hours running per week, then add one workout or two, do that for a few weeks, then add the third. Is it better to start with 2 x 30 minute sub-t workouts? 3 x 20?
Slowly increase mileage. Get used to it. Add intensity.
Similar to Beauty and The Beast. A Tale as old as time
Something that was mentioned a few pages back and seems quite common when people are struggling with the method is related to the increase in load. If you’re not already training a decent amount and you jump into this, you’ll likely struggle.
Is there a recommendation for how to start? I.e. get to X number of hours running per week, then add one workout or two, do that for a few weeks, then add the third. Is it better to start with 2 x 30 minute sub-t workouts? 3 x 20?
I can tell you what I did that seemed to work. I was at 25 mpw with a lot of anaerobic sprint work and racing from track. I started at 10% subT over 3 workouts (this was really easy), then increased this to 20% subT before increasing mileage (while staying at 20%). one thing though is that spreading a low amount of SubT work over 3 workouts is “safe” but probably doesn’t do as much as fitting the same amount of subT into 2 workouts. It seems to take me at least 10 minutes to get close to threshold. I view my approach as being a safe ramp up and really the first month was more preparation for real gains.
Id say use runalyze / intervals.icu. See what your current CTL is and play with it so you follow the right structure and keep the same CTL. Use 25% of time as subT. Form there very slowly increase time. First easy running and then extra subt. Sirpoc started of at 6.5h orso it think and 25m subt. Took him 2.5-3 year to get to 8h a week. I believe he does less % of subt as he increases to more running.
It might be a bit different in hours, % etc, as above but will be in the right ballpark for structure.
I think his consistent 7 days per week running for almost 3 years without any breaks, with 3 subT sessions per week. With such consistency, I guess even 40 mpw can be enough for great marathon results.
We're talking about Xel here, not sirpoc. I'm not sure what Xel's back ground is, but he claimed his marathon PB came after a 16 week block of 38mpw average, peaking at only 46. I'm very intrigued as I'm one to flame out easy when hitting 40-55 mpw
Something that was mentioned a few pages back and seems quite common when people are struggling with the method is related to the increase in load. If you’re not already training a decent amount and you jump into this, you’ll likely struggle.
Is there a recommendation for how to start? I.e. get to X number of hours running per week, then add one workout or two, do that for a few weeks, then add the third. Is it better to start with 2 x 30 minute sub-t workouts? 3 x 20?
Presumably you have an idea of your s/t paces. So you can work out how many miles covered for each 30 min session. Say you are covering circa 4 miles each session, so circa 12 miles in total, your weekly total mileage should be circa 48 miles per week. Etc.
if you don’t want to increase mileage and intensity at the same time, build up to 48 miles first, and then start adding in the S/T sessions.
This is a long term approach, so spending a few weeks getting your mileage into the right place before starting, is worth the investment.
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.
It is NOT Norwegian Singles at all. Almost the opposite. The mileage was what it was because I was very wary of overdoing it after having a long history of overdoing it.
It's deceptive to simply say it was a PR. It was a big marathon PR but it's not the best aerobic fitness I'd ever been in my life, as ~5 years earlier I ran a 1:10 HM. It's much easier to get back in shape than tread new ground. And if you read on in that thread you'll see details from my high school career that demonstrate some talent for running fast off little training.
IIRC, my main motivation for making the thread was for the few people like me, to encourage them to train as lightly/cautiously as possible without fearing that they're undertraining. It's absolutely not to share a magic build that gets insane results for very little training - that'd be the previous fitness and talent.
"Talent" is really nice for the sub-sub-elite level but I think it makes it much more difficult to avoid overtraining when aspiring to reach the sub-elite or elite level, thus my interest in this approach. I certainly had aspirations to reach those levels and failed.
What I like about the Norwegian Singles approach: on the micro scale, I love to see how easy of a workout is proven to build significant fitness. On the macro scale, I love the philosophy of "don't drastically increase training load if you're still getting faster." I'm not currently 100% on this method but I find this thread to have some good contributors, and I share a lot of the philosophy or mindset with users of this method.
I wonder if anyone has done lactate testing comparing types of sprint training.
Usually strides are more at mile pace for me but reasonable minds can differ.
Just a little friendly correction from the magic one ...🤠 ) A stride is not one pace but a controlled acceleration of normaly 50-100m and vary of 85-95 % of top sprint speed.
I dont use Reddit or the wiki nor do I need someone’s stamp of approval.
It’s like you guys have ignored 20+ years of sports science practice and now someone used basic load tracking principles to guide their training and he’s your Messiah.
Kinda like Apple fanboys when Apple does something that has been around forever and they market as some evolutionary feature.
It just makes me chuckle.
It does make me laugh, the start of the thead we had people saying "nobody trains like this". "This won't work for running". "You can't run a good marathon like this".
Clearly it works magnificently. Then people come around and suddenly they have trained like this for 10 years.
I defy anyone to really find many hobbyists training from the ground up, rather than scaled down elite plans that are flawed. If there are many, they certainly weren't sharing information or helping masses like this thread and method has.
It's funny when something new comes along (of course nothing is new really in training) that people come out of the woodwork to show us how smart they are "but I knew all this already" , yet curiously never helped anyone or shared the information.
That's really what makes me chuckle, even from and old skeptic like me.
Not to be obvious, but the very first post in this thread described how someone (Kristoffer Ingebrigtsen) was already doing the Norwegian Singles Method, and did train like this, and the poster was asking if maybe the 3 quality sessions in the NSM were too many.
Kristoffer's training was on Strava for anyone who cared to look (and obviously someone did, because it's linked in a Letsrun thread from nearly three years ago called "How to apply Norwegian approach without doubles?").
The lesson from this thread isn't that NSM is new and astounding, it's how few people really spend a lot of time looking into and thinking about what others are doing.
Thanks a lot. This week I did 60 minutes of easy running every day and two quality workouts: 12 x 3 minutes close to 60' race pace (@3:20/km) with 1 minute of very light jogging as recovery The other quality session was 3 x 12 minutes close to 30 km / 2-hour race pace (@3:33/km — it was a bit windy) I think my current marathon pace is around 3:35–3:40/km, and my half marathon pace around 3:23–3:25/km. To run under 2h30', I’ll need to be able to comfortably run: 10 x 3’ @3:15–3:18/km 5 x 5’ @3:20/km 3 x 10’ @3:25/km 3–5 x 15’ @3:30/km With a lot of patience, I’ll get there.
