the "sweet spot" training method in cycling has been around for over 15 to 20 years...it was a mainstream approach to training back then so is nothing new or novel when it comes to cycling.
Steve, if you're still reading: Thanks for everything you've given to the running community. I read The Science of Running 10 years ago when I was just coming back to running as an adult, and it helped me finally understand what I was doing with training. It was hugely important for me. Also, I'm nearly caught up on the podcasts - I save them for my winter indoor running, so I should be current by next spring.
I haven't added strides for speed development, but a while ago I noticed that my form was getting to be awful. So I added the minimal effective dose of drills before a run, literally just a few things in my front room before I head out the door. Then before a sub-T workout, I'll do one mile easy as warmup, then a second mile with some basic surges thrown in, focusing on knee lift/putting force into the ground, just so my form isn't a complete a mess.
I'm old, so a dedicated speed day would take a lot of recovery time, but some basic work to focus on form and efficiency doesn't have to take anything away from the regular training.
if you ‘simplified’ this method any more youd need to get ppl a helmet for running
check the reddit: this wasnt copied from Bakken, but it’s Bakken endorsed
your anaerobic capacity is built very quickly at the expense of your threshold through race pace 3k/5k stuff (800s/1000s)
your speed development is not the same as your anaerobic capacity. those 200s/hill are not building your anaerobic capacity but your rhythm, as you were trying to explain
so, dont be as worried about the ‘shift’ as you should be worried about the ‘foundation’; changing the stimulus is not as important as getting the fundamentals correct. Being 5-10% under trained is better than 1% overtrained, hands down. Especially for amateurs.
Canova is a domain only for those who are working out, eating, and lying on a couch all day. He’s a smart guy, but his approach to training is not transferrable to ‘amateurs’ other than the incredibly general framework Bakken laid out in the 100 day plan.
We get the history, from your video, but this system is trying to idiot proof aerobic development generally.
stick to what bakken already recently suggested: do sub T until 6 weeks out from race season, then start to incorporate traditional 5k work every 10 days but being incredibly careful not to start building your anaerobic capacity because thats the beginning of the end of your true base for that season. once you start robbing peter to pay paul (swapping short term anaerobic capacity to power your results vs higher fractional utilization) your results will suffer the inevitable divergence that meets the end of most runners seasons
sure, you can push your stall out there for a little while (even see Running with the Buffaloes) but once you do the check is coming due
But i will say, Steve Magness, what you have contributed is really hard to measure for those of us coming up in the early internet age. I disagree with some of your takes now, but the debt of gratitude i have to you as an early light of internet content and training information, im not sure the thankfulness can be quantified accurately — to me still pretty seminal work/contributions to this space that i dont think anyone can properly or adequately thank you for!
Personally I've had great success with this method after returning from a multi-year break but have recently stalled in my progression. Steve mentions in his video how after doing so much of one kind of training your limiting factor will change. I could just keep spamming sub-T only and hope for more progress but at this point I'd just be experiencing diminishing returns in race performance from continuing to focus solely on pushing my lactate curve to the right. This isn't to say that people wouldn't experience continuous improvement from focusing only on sub-t sessions but perhaps I would benefit more from dropping a sub-t session to more specifically target my other deficiencies, whether it be in the form of hill sprints or 200m repeats.
I think a lot of people also get stuck in the 7-day week trap (not saying this is you specifically). "Dropping a sub-t session" for something else doesn't have to mean every week; it could be once every 2-3 weeks to spin the gears a little bit without changing as much in the overall scheme of things.
"For fast twitch guys, too much subthreshold kills them. Too much subthreshold, especially for fast twitch oriented athletes, it shifts that balance where the anaerobic capacity goes down, they have a huge aerobic engine, but they can't utilize it as well. Bakken said for that type you're better off training right at threshold (& not subthreshold) & decreasing volume."
Interesting. I've been wondering about this with myself. I feel like I have a big aerobic engine in races where I can keep going forever, but I can't kick it into high gear. Like I'm being held back & I struggle getting my HR above 90%.
Ran a hilly cross country 5k few weeks ago about as hard as I could. I wasn't too pleased with my time. After resting for 10-15 min after the race I felt pretty good (too good to have just raced) so I decided to do a 3 mile continuous effort at 30k pace & it wasn't bad at all. Normally I'm easily able to get above 90% HR & feel wasted after a race (like you should).
Should add I've been doing this for 9 months now & have felt this for last 4 months. So not some newbie 1 month in. I'm going to have to re listen to this episode & take some notes.
To me one key part of this idiot-proof training is the fact that there are no "hero workouts". As a hobby jogger who caught the itch in 2020, the first thing I found was Hal Higdon's training plans, then Pete Pfitz's, then Hanson's. I remember having some solid races but also feeling so beat up during training. But, there were inevitable days where I had to move training around, because of travel, getting sick, a niggle, whatever. Then I asked myself, how the heck am I supposed to fit in this 17 mile long run with 14 at MP and then a 9 mile run the next day in, and then get to my medium long run, and so on... Without a proper coach, I was screwed.
The thing I love about this is there's no guilt or catch up needed. If I have to miss a workout, no big deal. It's essentially the same workout every time anyways. Or if I need to take an extra easy day or skip because of time constraints, no problem I think this is also an underrated part of this training.
Personally I've had great success with this method after returning from a multi-year break but have recently stalled in my progression. Steve mentions in his video how after doing so much of one kind of training your limiting factor will change. I could just keep spamming sub-T only and hope for more progress but at this point I'd just be experiencing diminishing returns in race performance from continuing to focus solely on pushing my lactate curve to the right. This isn't to say that people wouldn't experience continuous improvement from focusing only on sub-t sessions but perhaps I would benefit more from dropping a sub-t session to more specifically target my other deficiencies, whether it be in the form of hill sprints or 200m repeats.
I think a lot of people also get stuck in the 7-day week trap (not saying this is you specifically). "Dropping a sub-t session" for something else doesn't have to mean every week; it could be once every 2-3 weeks to spin the gears a little bit without changing as much in the overall scheme of things.
Heavily agree with this. Thinking of training cycles as larger macro cycles than 7 day weekly cycles also allows you to take more easy days or adjust the spacing of workouts following races if needed. I think that's why a lot of elites run by 10-14 day training cycles as well.
I don’t think Steve was being disingenuous, but I believe he’s fallen into the trap of viewing training from a top-down, elite perspective. It’s an easy mistake to make when analyzing running programs. However, I think this approach is flawed for hobby joggers.
To me, the genius of Sirpoc’s approach lies in three key aspects:
He had no preconceived notions about how runners train.
He drew on his success from another sport, that wasn't a mainstream approach at the time either.
Most importantly, he approached the problem from the bottom up, focusing on the needs of everyday runners.
This bottom-up perspective is what many overlook. It’s why Sirpoc’s carefully balanced Norwegian singles approach is best followed closely, or at least with its core principles in mind. For hobby joggers, our primary limitation is almost certainly aerobic capacity. Other factors matter far less and don’t need to be isolated for improvement.
Easier said than done, of course. It’s tempting to tweak the program with old habits or ideas picked up elsewhere, but I believe adding the elements Steve suggests—even for runners in the 15–16-minute 5K range—misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with Steve that certain factors become limiters at the sub-elite or elite level, for most of us in this thread, focusing on Sirpoc’s principles and making the best use of our limited training time is the way to go. There's just far too many testimonials to ignore and far too many who have tried to get clever with it or add in more traditional work and have messed the balance up.
This focus on aerobic capacity, combined with Sirpoc’s finer details, is what makes his approach so unique and eye-opening for hobby joggers. It’s not easy—sticking to the plan is challenging, and the urge to revert to old habits is easy, I've make this mistake myself.
While I agree with Steve that we’ll eventually need to identify when to do more, I disagree that simply adding intensity, pushing the boat out, or getting greedy fast—as we’ve seen people want to do in this thread—is the answer. The answer is to carefully understand what is going on and add in more volume whilst finely balancing it. Again, I think I've seen enough from others to know if you get this right, you can basically keep getting faster without rocking the boat.
I’m excited about the book. Based on Chillruns’ glowing review, I hope and assume it’s designed to address the challenges of hobby jogging, rather than scaling down elite training methods. That’s the secret sauce here and a trap many coaches fall into when working with hobby clients.
Sorry, Steve, if this feels like I’m singling you out—I don’t mean it as criticism. I just think the bottom-up approach is a hugely overlooked factor. Before I trained like this, I was obsessed with how Jakob’s methods could apply to me. In retrospect, what elites like Jakob do is almost irrelevant to my life as a hobby jogger. Sirpoc’s carefully balanced Norwegian singles approach is far more relevant. Most of us could replicate it 1:1 if we prioritized our time. But it’s so finely tuned that tweaking it too much can lead to problems.
Just my thoughts. Great to see this thread still going strong!
I think this is a fantastic post and sums it up perfectly. I’ve always believed that when people try to get clever with this, they’re tempted to tweak a few things, and then it becomes something entirely different. I find it odd that people do this with this method. If you had a coach or even a Daniels’ plan as an example, most folks would stick to it or follow instructions without much drama. Yet, not just Sirpoc, but hundreds of people have followed his approach more or less as intended, with insanely good results. Then some random internet user, Fitzgerald, or Steve Magness swoops in from nowhere to “improve” it. Haven’t we been here before?
Sweet spot training isn’t new; it probably goes back 15 years and gradually became more mainstream. But don’t forget, Sirpoc was one of the early adopters. He’s been through this before, I’m sure, at the start of something niche that later became huge in the sport. As runners, we’re a lot like cyclists were back then, overcomplicating the basics that work for most of us with little need for tweaks, turning it into something else entirely.
I speak from experience here. I initially trained like this and thought it was “dumb” because it lacked speedwork, so I added some in, along with strides. But then the balance Sirpoc created went up in a puff of smoke, and I was back to just another overly hard training program. I hit reset, went back to what some call the “vanilla” Sirpoc method, and seven months later, I’m in the best shape of my life. For most people, the feedback is the same: add more than a few warm-up drills or a light sprinkle of strides, and the balance feels off, leading to a slippery slope.
For most of us, just enjoy the thread, the knowledge, and the experimentation Sirpoc put in, plus the two years since where people have tried every variation. Yet, it still comes back to the vanilla plan or the marathon adaptation, those are pretty much spot-on. I get why Steve wants to put his spin on it; as you said, Sirpoc is basically making coaches redundant. Of course, this won’t work for everyone as what training does? There’s no magic bullet. But if you had to give a program to a random runner, from mildly recreational to the cusp of sub-elite, this is as close to one-size-fits-all as it gets.
That said, I don’t think coaches are obsolete. Sirpoc has clearly worked closely with people in this thread (like the grandma’s guy, and others have mentioned it too). One flaw with a lot of runners is they need to be told what to do. Instead of others putting their own spin on it for their brand, a coaching business or group would be better off getting Sirpoc on board to fine-tune the details for each athlete, rather than someone less invested adding their own twist. Coaches still have a place, even with this training. All training is pretty simple, yet we have coaches, and I don’t see this as any different.
It’s great to see the thread open for good debate, as always. I think people don’t give that enough credit, especially by LetsRun standards.
I think this is a fantastic post and sums it up perfectly. I’ve always believed that when people try to get clever with this, they’re tempted to tweak a few things, and then it becomes something entirely different. I find it odd that people do this with this method. If you had a coach or even a Daniels’ plan as an example, most folks would stick to it or follow instructions without much drama. Yet, not just Sirpoc, but hundreds of people have followed his approach more or less as intended, with insanely good results. Then some random internet user, Fitzgerald, or Steve Magness swoops in from nowhere to “improve” it. Haven’t we been here before?
Sweet spot training isn’t new; it probably goes back 15 years and gradually became more mainstream. But don’t forget, Sirpoc was one of the early adopters. He’s been through this before, I’m sure, at the start of something niche that later became huge in the sport. As runners, we’re a lot like cyclists were back then, overcomplicating the basics that work for most of us with little need for tweaks, turning it into something else entirely.
I speak from experience here. I initially trained like this and thought it was “dumb” because it lacked speedwork, so I added some in, along with strides. But then the balance Sirpoc created went up in a puff of smoke, and I was back to just another overly hard training program. I hit reset, went back to what some call the “vanilla” Sirpoc method, and seven months later, I’m in the best shape of my life. For most people, the feedback is the same: add more than a few warm-up drills or a light sprinkle of strides, and the balance feels off, leading to a slippery slope.
For most of us, just enjoy the thread, the knowledge, and the experimentation Sirpoc put in, plus the two years since where people have tried every variation. Yet, it still comes back to the vanilla plan or the marathon adaptation, those are pretty much spot-on. I get why Steve wants to put his spin on it; as you said, Sirpoc is basically making coaches redundant. Of course, this won’t work for everyone as what training does? There’s no magic bullet. But if you had to give a program to a random runner, from mildly recreational to the cusp of sub-elite, this is as close to one-size-fits-all as it gets.
That said, I don’t think coaches are obsolete. Sirpoc has clearly worked closely with people in this thread (like the grandma’s guy, and others have mentioned it too). One flaw with a lot of runners is they need to be told what to do. Instead of others putting their own spin on it for their brand, a coaching business or group would be better off getting Sirpoc on board to fine-tune the details for each athlete, rather than someone less invested adding their own twist. Coaches still have a place, even with this training. All training is pretty simple, yet we have coaches, and I don’t see this as any different.
It’s great to see the thread open for good debate, as always. I think people don’t give that enough credit, especially by LetsRun standards.
Great post as well. Those of us who (fortunately or unfortunately depending on your view) have been on the Strava group almost from day 1 have seen this play out. Guy comes along, puts the changes in he wants and falls apart in 3 months. Usually people plead with them to stop straying from the line so much, they get called fanatics but said guy falls apart anyway.
This isn't anything against Steve, but this approach you cannot start to play around with it. Steve is high profile but he would be like the 100th guy probably just in the thread alone, let into taking onto account Strava and Reddit who are like "that looks cool, but also try and add in this, or this".
It almost never ends well. If that makes me a fanatic, so be it. But it's not like we haven't been here before. By the way, I also fully agree with other points mate. Shirtboy in particular. Make it anymore simple, you'd need a crash hat on and arm bands. Yet I don't think it makes it easy to execute, especially if you don't understand really what is going on or what you need to do, so you can progress long term. I know that sounds contradictory, but I hope that some people pick up on what I mean. It's actually how easy it is that makes it so tempting to just start adding in the other stuff you don't need. The hard part is setting aside all the bad habits we have picked up as hobby guys and gals.
Now we're just going to spam you with questions about the book instead, lol.
For example, does it address sensible variations (e.g., the only one I might want to make, as above, is simply alternating easy and sub-T every other day, no back-to-back easy days to fit a long run in)?
If the team is short of editors for language, logic, detail, etc., I'd be very happy to contribute (as I mentioned a while ago on here, as 'kettle on' or something like that).
There’s a whole section on the marathon and also schedules for five hours to nine hours a week.
Sirpoc doesn’t go into detail specifically about alternating sub T and easy but I can give you my two cents. I think the back to back easy runs help a ton with overall sustainability. Bakken would probably say that it helps muscle tone or tension to have that weekly reset.
If you look at Sirpoc’s Strava you’ll see that he does his long intervals on Tuesday following the back to back easy days and that when tapering for a 10k or half marathon, he’ll do two easy days prior to the race. Those back to back easy pace runs really helps to shed lingering fatigue.
The benefit of the long run is that it’s a sneaky way to add load while also giving a reset. This is especially helpful if say, you race on Saturday. You can jump straight into LR then E and be good to go on Tuesday. All of that becomes much more precarious if you’re alternating ST/ E indefinitely.
Also, the advantage to alternating ST/E is that you get an extra ST session every 2 weeks. The problem is you still need to stay in the 75/25ish E:ST time ratio, so you’d probably find that you need to slightly reduce ST volume in each session to make it sustainable, which would neutralize the advantage you’re going for.
In my mind it’s similar to the question, “why not just do steady MP runs everyday?” If there isn’t enough slack in the system it’s easier to get progressively fatigued without being able to bounce back. That catches up eventually and will force you to slow down or reduce volume of ST.
Questions about the book are awesome. One of the reasons why myself, grandma’s guy, and the other fast old guy(lol) were asked to read the draft is to spot if anything is missing. I don’t think there is, but your questions would help highlight a gap if there is one.
Thanks, that's really useful. I'd been thinking of the long run just in terms of adding load in its own unique way rather than as part of a reset/buffer that still manages to be productive. It had been slightly niggling at me but now it feels like the last piece of the jigsaw falling into place! It can be hard to schedule against work commitments but I'll fit it in from now on.
I agree about steady/MP every day as that's how I used to train, and went through constant cycles of build followed by injury/overtraining, like many on here no doubt. Never again.
Steve can correct me if I'm wrong, but I would guess that NSA is a poor fit for most or even all of the runners he's worked with at the HS, college, or pro level. They're not time-constrained hobby joggers focused on 5K-HM for decades at a time, but HS/college runners often racing distances under 5K during a 2-3 month season of competition for 4 years max, and with an intense focus on peaking at the right time and competing to win or score in a race. Or they're pros whose careers depend on outkicking opponents in a key race, where that final .5% or even .1% really does make a difference between continuing as a pro and finding an office job. Of course speed development is crucial in that world.
Meanwhile, us aging hobby joggers need way more than 6 weeks to respond to training, but we can keep plodding away week after week indefinitely. Is a day of speed development worth dropping a sub-T workout once a week or once a month on our quest to break 18:00 in a 5K? I don't know. Someone could try it and find out. Every time I think about how I can maximize my sustainable training load in a given week, though, I come back to NSA.
NSA is idiot proof and thats good. For those of us who are not idiots, Magnesses video provides a good explanaition of why we need to add in some icing on the top kind of work (hills, 200s, etc) to not leave gains at the table. The idiots can keep to the simpler and plainer version of NSA with just subT and E.
Thank you... early days yet but promising signs. The plan was always to be that after a 5K block (wrapped it up end of May) I went into a summer of mileage. So my structure through summer was:
Tuesday = Double Threshold day (5 x 2K AM around LT1 and then either 10 / 1K - 12 X 800 - 25 X 400 PM) Thursday = Long Single Threshold day (after playing around, I decided to keep it simple and locked in with 3K reps wrapped in a 30 minutes warm up / cool down to make it a 16 miler). I did this extra before & after mileage as I wanted to bridge the gap between short distance & long distance training as I knew I had a marathon coming up but I didnt want to lock into the specific phase until 8 weeks out (6 big weeks / 2 taper) Saturday = 20 x 30 second hills once again wrapped in a bigger warm up & cool down. This structure allowed for a minimum of 30k controlled quality work (not including the hills) a week and I did this for 9 or 10 weeks.
Then between 12 > 8 weeks out from the marathon I went a bit more towards the true NSA method and did those weeks with mainly 1k/2k/3k reps bar one down week due to holiday.
Now i'm into the final 8 weeks (5 weeks out now) and i've just switched the Tuesday from single T to a marathon specific workout so basically longer reps... the second workout of the week is still single T and the long run again just includes reps around that sub t effort.
Once again in this phase, I am getting around 30k controlled work (maybe slightly towards 34/35 in these peak weeks). I found 30k to be the sweetspot for me, I can comfortably knock that out a week without feeling overstretched.
The marathon will be what it will be but after that... I will once again return to this methodology for the winter.
I would finally like to add that I am doing strides once, if not twice a week but thats a personal preference as I am someone with a long stride and low cadence so I find it really helps me mechanically as I dont want to lose touch with this side of things when I return to the shorter work post marathon.
So hopefully from the above, you can see I am not following a true NSA formula, however I am using the "sweetspot" so to speak for the reps and consistently trying to hit 30k weekly work, whether thats in the form of double t / single t weeks or full single t. What I can confirm is that aerobically it's doing wonders and my HR for the half marathon was 169 average, when in fact my other recent halfs are usually in the realms of 171/174.
Questions about the book are awesome. One of the reasons why myself, grandma’s guy, and the other fast old guy(lol) were asked to read the draft is to spot if anything is missing. I don’t think there is, but your questions would help highlight a gap if there is one.
Ok, here's another then :) Does it cover doubling, not just as part of progression once you've reached a physiological limit of singles, but to overcome real-life hobbyjogger constraints like the length of your lunch break or how long you've got between work and feeding the family?
If you can only spare an hour or less for any individual session in the working week, with another 1:00 plus 1:30 LR at the weekend, that's 7:30 a week with 23% sub-T (assuming 35 mins per session). Where do you go from there if you can't extend the Mon-Fri sessions?
I can imagine some imperfect options like below but it would be really useful if the book covered this (maybe it's already come up in the thread; I still haven't read it all yet):
Adding easy doubles and accepting a low sub-T %.
Doing a long sub-T session at the weekend (doing the week's extra load on one day would surely be too much, and would bugger up the long run which would have to be the day after).
Somehow splitting sub-T into doubles to create an alternative low-mileage, hobbyjogger version of double threshold.
NSA is idiot proof and thats good. For those of us who are not idiots, Magnesses video provides a good explanaition of why we need to add in some icing on the top kind of work (hills, 200s, etc) to not leave gains at the table. The idiots can keep to the simpler and plainer version of NSA with just subT and E.
Everything Steve has said, is valid. But not for hobby joggers, let alone the guys jumping on this who are masters. Make those changes and let us know how it goes. Strava is absolutely littered with guys who have found this out the hard way. It's a story almost as old as the thread itself. You can do these things, but you will be giving something up, or at least need to, in another area, which eat into the low hanging aerobic gains fruit.
I cannot emphasise enough as others have already pointed out, magness is well down the list of guys who have tried to improve this, f**ked around and found out.
It's like we are just ignoring all we have learned in two years of this thread. There is room for shifting round a bit here and there, but you are always then making a compromise somewhere else. Then suddenly, you aren't training the same way anymore anyway, or losing the focus.
Questions about the book are awesome. One of the reasons why myself, grandma’s guy, and the other fast old guy(lol) were asked to read the draft is to spot if anything is missing. I don’t think there is, but your questions would help highlight a gap if there is one.
Ok, here's another then :) Does it cover doubling, not just as part of progression once you've reached a physiological limit of singles, but to overcome real-life hobbyjogger constraints like the length of your lunch break or how long you've got between work and feeding the family?
If you can only spare an hour or less for any individual session in the working week, with another 1:00 plus 1:30 LR at the weekend, that's 7:30 a week with 23% sub-T (assuming 35 mins per session). Where do you go from there if you can't extend the Mon-Fri sessions?
I can imagine some imperfect options like below but it would be really useful if the book covered this (maybe it's already come up in the thread; I still haven't read it all yet):
Adding easy doubles and accepting a low sub-T %.
Doing a long sub-T session at the weekend (doing the week's extra load on one day would surely be too much, and would bugger up the long run which would have to be the day after).
Somehow splitting sub-T into doubles to create an alternative low-mileage, hobbyjogger version of double threshold.
Progressing via intensity but not time.
Excellent questions. Monday to Friday most of my runs are at lunchtime so realistically capped at 45 minutes total per run (office optics). So with singles I have a limit on the amount of volume I can do. I have a long run at the weekend but typically have Saturday as a rest day as I have a young family (and long suffering wife).
I do run early morning or late at night when required, but don't think that's sustainable from a sleep/family perspective five days a week. Two days a week to increase easy volume, potentially. I suppose it's stage of life and working within our own time constraints as best we can.
Everything Steve has said, is valid. But not for hobby joggers, let alone the guys jumping on this who are masters. Make those changes and let us know how it goes. Strava is absolutely littered with guys who have found this out the hard way. It's a story almost as old as the thread itself. You can do these things, but you will be giving something up, or at least need to, in another area, which eat into the low hanging aerobic gains fruit.
I cannot emphasise enough as others have already pointed out, magness is well down the list of guys who have tried to improve this, f**ked around and found out.
It's like we are just ignoring all we have learned in two years of this thread. There is room for shifting round a bit here and there, but you are always then making a compromise somewhere else. Then suddenly, you aren't training the same way anymore anyway, or losing the focus.
Yeah it's a tale very familiar. Guy doesn't think sirpoc training offers enough, makes adjustments, makes it unbalanced and then will complain sirpoc training doesn't work for them, despite them not following how it's designed.
It's kind of mad we keep coming back to people wanting to tweak the parts they don't like, or add in stuff that's deliberately avoided as part of very careful planning. Then the training doesn't work.
There's also plenty of other training programs out there to try, that will work better by design as intended if you can't stick to this approach within pretty narrow parameters.
For me, I follow sirpoc, grandmas guy plus the old US master who has broken 15 recently in the 5k. You know what they all have in common? They haven't got cute with it or messed with it. It's absolutely just doing what needs to be done. Also, the guy on Reddit who ran like a 2:4x marathon and had never broken 3:10 before in like ten attempts? Again, whilst he is not as fast as the above mentioned, his progress is absolutely ridiculous. He also ran a crazy mile PB by almost a minute. Same pattern, just weeks, months and I think well over a year of this point of just following things absolutely as laid out and still improving.
That's good enough for me to stick to it. It's like the same debate about FT and ST that comes up. By my count there is at least a dozen guys on this thread alone who were all FT and speed guys, who in the end just stuck to it as laid out and improved massively, with slight road humps at the beginning but then coming out the other side without worrying about FT v ST. That evidence again is overwhelming in the confines of this system, yet guys still will die on the hill that this must be tweaked for ST despite all the first hand evidence in the real world.
Runners just can't help themselves. Always looking for the magic formula. I think what people are struggling with is that for a hobby jogger we have as close to found it as you'll get. All the evidence certainly points to it. The reason the thread is so big is because time goes on and there's more success. For real, the strike rate of this system over anything else is ridiculously good.
Ok, here's another then :) Does it cover doubling, not just as part of progression once you've reached a physiological limit of singles, but to overcome real-life hobbyjogger constraints like the length of your lunch break or how long you've got between work and feeding the family?
If you can only spare an hour or less for any individual session in the working week, with another 1:00 plus 1:30 LR at the weekend, that's 7:30 a week with 23% sub-T (assuming 35 mins per session). Where do you go from there if you can't extend the Mon-Fri sessions?
I can imagine some imperfect options like below but it would be really useful if the book covered this (maybe it's already come up in the thread; I still haven't read it all yet):
Adding easy doubles and accepting a low sub-T %.
Doing a long sub-T session at the weekend (doing the week's extra load on one day would surely be too much, and would bugger up the long run which would have to be the day after).
Somehow splitting sub-T into doubles to create an alternative low-mileage, hobbyjogger version of double threshold.
Progressing via intensity but not time.
For chillruns as well:
Anything on cross training? Beginner plans for less than 5 hours? What happens once you get to the end of the singles system? All sort of linking into what is above.
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