Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Down votes come when someone repeats what has already been covered, or just repeats in general. Take lexel or Coggan. Who are married to their positions. Or someone who says "But guys, what about speedwork? It's important you know, you guys will suck without it". Steve has relatively got off lightly by this threads standards, considering he definitely falls into the category of not really adding anything new , bar thousands of extra words.

There's been plenty of division at times in the thread where both sides get their fair share of praise. It's the same old stuff people roll their eyes at

2+ years on and having covered just about everything, quite rightly has less patience than once upon a time.

There is plenty of disagreement and critical thinking here

The nature of this thread doesn't lend itself well, there's no stick, faq section.

At this point, there's barely a new question that hasn't been asked many times. There's some useful questions to cheetodust that got asked today. But this sort of thing is rare. That's not to say it's fair to have expected everyone to read it all. But when speedwork, hills, x factor sessions, how to adapt this to the marathon etc comes up time and time again, like there's some revelation, it's a bit tiresome.

How do I adapt this to the indoor 60m?

"You people are so closed minded". This is usually the response of people who don't like the answer they get. 90% of the time it's on them, more than the other way around. I've joined Reddit and Strava and people are way more tolerant of some of the idiots than they should be, especially considering you know, this is the internet.

There's been some great critical thinking in this thread. Posts from sirpoc obviously, back and forth between Hard2find and Coggan , whilst they didn't agree was hugely respectful. Chillruns, jiggy, shirtboy. There's tons of views in the melting pot and not everyone comes up on the same side.

"BuT wHaT AbOuT SpEeDwOrk" you guys could do this, it'll make things better! Like it hasn't been covered a million times (and fed back). OR I only run 4 days a week, would this work for me? Or the greek singles guy. Or the chick running at LT1.5.

annoyance is a two way street

ppl also give genuine answers based on their experience with the schedule and ppl want to do whatever

that’s fine but ppl getting butt hurt constantly is a little old

it’s not orthodoxy its ‘asked and answered’ in most cases with not a ton of new or seminal questions

if you’ve had success with a certain tweak or schedule i think ppl are all ears and here for it; what ppl get annoyed at is ppl going ‘can i do this that and the other F ing thing and have the same results?’

ppl go you probably ‘should stay on base’ and get ‘this is a cult in response’

and around we go

how do i adapt this for pickleball?

I fall into that camp; started running inspired by, and mostly doing, Ultramarathons where the primary metric I aimed for was just running as much as I could every week (not worrying about paces or structure at all). I have all the same life stresses as many in the thread and got pretty “good” at Ultras.

Anyway, motivation shifted and I got more interested in 5k-Marathon, and ran some decent times in hindsight off of zero specific training.

I then thought “I should probably get specific” and dove headfirst into running training literature for the first time in my life. If you’re here, you can guess the story: I got slower + more injury prone + burnt out.

I’ve basically had to eat humble pie and tear down my fitness to start again with this Sirpoc method for the last year. The better approach would clearly have been to maintain my training load and incrementally shift towards it but that’s a high-wire act to the extreme IMO.
Long story short; I’m still not there, but am very close to where I was (especially as I’ve gotten back to within -20% of my previous comfortable volume while balancing the whole thing I’m making insane gains, where every 2-3 weeks I’m racing and my VDOT is going up by almost half a point every time). It’s taken a lot of patience and humility.

More importantly, I feel like I’ve got loads of runway beyond what I thought my previous ceiling was, and the risks feel as mitigated as they can be in running. I’m racing really well, and have no doubt that within the next 12-18 months I’ll absolutely smash my PRs.

As a side note: the one thing I’ve found is that I don’t need to be that strict on the ~25% of SubT per week particularly as I’m building volume I find the 3x30mins more than enough for now. Once I hit my sustainable weekly volume I’ll start tweaking and inching that % share up.

Any oldies on here, over 60s, over 70s?

let us know when Steve creates something like Coggan. Until then this is a bad book report

I know this has been asked before but how long would people give this method if they are not showing any signs of improvement? For context I started doing 3 sub-t workouts a week in the middle of April after completing a marathon block. During that block I ran 35:41 for a 10k in March so I used that time to work out my paces for the various workouts.

Since April I have been running the standard routine that has been set out in the thread, 3 easy days, 3 sub-t workouts and 1 longer run at easy day pace. Along with basing my paces for the sub-t workout days on the threshold pace from the previously mentioned 10k race
(which i made slightly slower just to be cautious) and keeping easy days slower than what I had been running them at during marathon training, I looked up sirpoc's marathon block and calculated the percentages of his 10k pace he would use for workouts/easy days and used these as a guide to see if I was running in the right ranges for how this system has been described. Overall I found the workout's manageable, I would say mostly a 6/7 in terms of effort and I never really felt too fatigued to carry them out. I did slow down some paces over the summer just so I could feel in control in completing the required amount of reps, plus I had a few days off with sickness.

Now in terms of results I ran a parkrun 7 weeks in which I'd say I ran cautiously and got a time of 17:49. Next I ran a 5k race on a flat course at the start of July which is ran by a lot of local club runners so is easy to get pulled round to a fast time, I was semi targeting a sub 17 and ended up with a 17:12 which was a pb but according to vdot is about equivalent to my 10k time set back in March. After that I ran another 5k at the end of July but was only able to achieve a 17:31 on another flat course, a slight disappointment as again I was targeting sub 17 but blew up half way in. My final race was a 10k a few weeks ago in which I was aiming to run around 35 minutes, however I once again blew up and finished in a time of 36:34. Now I may have been ambitious to target a sub 35 given the course has a few hills in the second half and on the day the weather was significantly hotter than it had been the previous few weeks but I felt that being almost a minute slower than my March 10k time was quite a poor result and an indicator that I was not improving with this method of training.

So overall I am not really sure why I have not seen any improvement after 20 weeks of following this training style. I have been tracking load and doing 3 sub-t workouts plus 4 easy days has resulted in less load than what I had been producing during the marathon block I started the year with (mainly due to a shorter long run and less intensive workouts) so I am not sure if this has something to do with it. Also maybe post marathon fatigue or racing in hot summer weather may have been a factor, although I did see when sirpoc started doing this method his 10k time was exactly the same as mine and in 8 weeks of summer he was able to get a sub 17 5k. I have a few more races set up for the rest of the year so for now I'm not sure whether to keep at for a few more weeks to see if I make the breakthrough others have experienced or perhaps to alter things up given the recent discussions of adding in faster sessions to balance the method out.

Keep us posted, I'll be curious to hear how things go as the weather cools. I'm semi in the same boat. Came off a marathon block in the spring where I had a training load over 70 (as calculated by intervals.icu) for the 5 months prior, but was overcooked at race time. Switched to vanilla NSA (yes I've read the whole thread) and eased into it over a couple months.

Now it's 5 months in, my load is stuck in the mid 50s and I'm close but not at my 5k times from a year ago (ran on no specific training in the leadup to a half marathon A race). Pushing the load up beyond that gives my legs that cooked feeling, so I'm staying conservative and patient as I see how well I adapt. To give more specifics - this translates to me racing ~17:45+ 5ks (vs. ~17:30- a year ago), recovery runs ~9:00+/mile, intervals ~5secs slower than the fastest recommended paces with HR peaking a few beat shy of my LTHR for 1k reps, and 5+ beats shy of LTHR for the longer reps.

It's not surprising my times haven't improved on a slightly reduced load, but what is surprising is that I haven't been able to lift my load higher. The ST workouts feel controlled to easy-ish, recovery runs feel tougher from residual fatigue (consistent with what sirpoc has commented), and each time I've tried gently to scale weekly hours, I end up needing a down week or two to get things back on track.

The plan for now is to stick with things for a couple more months and see where I am - I'm enjoying the simplicity of the training, and the feeling of not overextending myself as I normally do in A-race focused training blocks. After that (if I continue to not see meaningful results), maybe I'll tweak vanilla with replacing every 5th or 6th ST session add something more X oriented - Magness's rhythm workouts sound fun, maybe with some mixed pace workouts, or the out-of-style 400m NSA repeats, we'll see. Also possibly long steady running (really fun for me - going sub 7 on most of a long run), or Kenyan-style progression runs (shout out to Running Writings).

I'm not sure where you're located but I'll weigh in a bit with my experience. I did NSM last year starting in May and planning to race a 10k in October(the previous year I ran a 44+ on the course). I made exactly zero progress for 3 months (located on the Mid-Atlantic). I'm quite a bit slower than you but anyway nothing moved. I was feeling utterly dejected going into September as it felt like I'd made no progress. Then all the sudden the weather changed and my legs and lungs felt fresh, my paces all dropped by 15-25 seconds a mile and I went on to run a mid 39 in October. I would been happy with a 41 or 42

This year was rough to start for me. I took some time off, had an injury not related to running, lost a fair bit of fitness. Since May I've been able to stick on a pretty vanilla NSM plan again, but I've bumped the mileage from 50 to 60 a week and increase the subT amount in proportion.

Same story, an absolute slog. No progress in June, July, and most of August. Doubting the whole thing again, but not as much. Feel like the no way I'll even run under 40 min again.

Two weeks ago the dew point randomly drop from about 70 to 45 for a couple of days. Temps still approach 80 but, hey, that's better than mid 90s. My 4x2k dips from 7:05 pace to 6:30 , with no change in HR.

I was elated...but not exactly surprised this year. I have no clue what I'll run next month, I could blow up. But there's absolutely no way I could've run that that workout last fall. 25% more volume, easily 20 seconds a mile faster than any 2k interval I ran at the same time last year, and HR well below my LT2 (Friel test)

The heat and humidity have returned, and now I'm slower than I was 2 weeks ago, but I'm open to idea that I may be in significantly better shape than last fall. Again, maybe not, but it really is just impossible to tell during the summer. When there's no short hard intervals where your just running fast and getting a bit of recovery to reset, and all the workouts are 30-40 minutes of, the heat and humidity can really mask what is legitimate progress.

Just my 2 cents.

You are going or produce less load than a marathon block. There's a reason a lot of people hit their PBs in a marathon block. If you can make it through them, it's usually people's peak fitness. No matter how they trained.

Have been at this method for over a year now. Started out last summer and ran into a lot of the same problems. Took me 6 months really to see the gains from the summer efforts and then fall for the speeds to pick up and result in actual results.

That might be too long for some people to find acceptable. But I'll caveat that with this fact: I was roughly about the same level for 7 straight seasons. Since around November last year when I finally improved and now I've taken over 70 seconds off my 5k PB after close to a decade of feeling like that was my ultimate peak. Fwiw, I also came into this training from a marathon in April 2024, so I definitely think that's a bit factor.

We have seen people try this method to get best bang for their buck as they can't run 10-12 hour weeks anymore. Some seem to have held fitness for a while, but ultimately I don't think there's any way you can replicate 12 hours running with 6, even if you train like this very efficiently. That's an extreme example, but I'm sure you get the point.

The reduced load is probably the reason for the "stagnation". What was the load in marathon block? How many hours a week did you run? Mileage? What is it now?

Short term, your load may be lower, but without the down weeks, long tapers, long recoveries after races you should, potentially, over a year of running similar weeks every week see the weekly load average to more or the same as it was during marathon training.

If, however, you've gone from 110k a week and 11 hours of running during marathon training down to 80k a week and 8 hours of running then you will see a drop off in performance for a lot, lot longer. You may well get back to where you were but it will take a long time. This is not a quick fix. It is about sustainable running for the long term. Some people have taken a year to see results

These are the posts of WHY this thread is no only still worth it, but also blows my mind.

I think a lot of people focus on the guys that got fast like this, but how common it is we see runners who have stagnated in their performance for literally years and years and this re-opens up the floodgates? To me that is the most remarkable thing and I hope it doesn't get lost in all this.

Steve Palladino appears to be supporting Steve Magness in his analysis.

That's irrelevant to me. Whilst I'm still not 100% sold on this method as pure vanilla, the results speak for themselves.

The onus on anyone who wants to improve it is to go away, get hundreds if not thousands of runners to experiment for over a year and then come back and show us the long term results. But the key point, is it sustainable?

All that evidence suggests not. Most tweaks people have made tweaks, regretted it and come back to the basic version.

Once you make some of the changes, you are back into the cycle of periodization and blocks. Something most of us are glad to see the back of and at the heart of just why this works so long term.

A lot of noise lately, I would be more interested to know why it works so well as is. Whilst I'm not convinced it will work for everyone, as a one size fits all it's as good as I've ever seen

Slightly slower than you but mostly in the same boat otherwise.

I'd already experimented with NSA a bit last summer and then fully committed in January this year but I'm not seeing any improvements at all. CTL looks fine/steady, nutrition is fine, workouts feel okay, but easy runs such a slog.

Tried mixing things up a bit since late June (nothing that really goes against the idea of NSA: a slightly longer long run, some 60/30 intervals where the HR consistently reaches LT2, some "fartleks" like Kristoffer is running, 4x(2k+1k) for example) but my last park run in decent conditions ended up roughly 45s slower than last year.

Idk, maybe it's just not working for me, although I'd be curious why.