Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

We are all presumably training to race, so racing is always going to be part of the landscape. However, 10Ks, 1/2 marathons, hill races, etc generally need more recovery than 5K TTs. Caution is needed pre and post race with fatigue and recovery.

The 5KTT is a good progress measurement. But, there is no need to immediately increase S/T paces after every improvement. Pace Increases can be gently phased in over time according to feel.

What do you guys think of the Coros running test done regularly in this program? It's 25 mins marathon pace, immediately followed by 3 mins 10k pace, immediately followed by 3 mins 5k pace. If you don't hit 90% HRR (unlikely if paces are anywhere close to correct) by the end, it has you do another 3 mins. Then it spits out LTHR/pace and race predictions (amongst other info that's less relevant to this thread).

Although it's a taxing session I feel like it could be done regularly (biweekly even), it's pretty subthresholdy with the MP volume, gives you some feedback, and maybe some X-factor with the higher effort stuff.

Too much of a "black box" compared to time trials, maybe?

Any chance we might have tips to bridge between close apart marathons in the book like Fritz, SirPoc?

Sirpoc has been running in cheap Chinese shoes. Not content with disrupting the training world, is he now going to disrupt the shoe market? Will Nike put a hit out on Sirpoc?

I'm a Coros user and have yet to do that test. It sounds brutal to me and too much of a disruption to my training. I'd rather just do a Parkrun when I'm ready.

Hopefully he will tell us the “take aways” from experimenting with the Chinese shoes.😀

Here ya go, so early thoughts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NorwegianSinglesRun/comments/1nunig5/seeking_lining_shoes_for_easy_long_runs_500520km/

Here's a tasty excerpt: "The hare pro 8 to me is a slightly more fun version of the Evo SL. The
jack of all trades. Again, not a knock on the Evo SL but the red hare pro is superior in almost every way for me."

Sirpoc has been training like this I believe for just around 150 weeks it seems in that time he has done 14 parkruns. That is a parkrun just over every 10 weeks and that average is skewed by doing more at the start of this training. We are looking at 5 a year. I agree, this is very much overblown. You can also see he goes a long time sometimes without racing, but performances are still usually better, since training like this. It's nice to test out fitness now and again, but it's certainly not an essential part of the overall system of the acculturation of safe load long term. It's a fraction of what goes into it, when you consider it's a 15-25 mins race range for most of us and yet we are doing 90 min week on week, month to month.

He has posted quite a bit about it. I don't think he's pushing a particular brand. Seems like as ever, this guy is the people's champion and just trying to help us save money. I almost would have expected by now someone to offer him free shoes and be pushing a brand?

I'm play with the pace, now i think i could run a marathin near 2h30' , so i'm working to improve my fitness.

this week

3x10' @3.29/3.30 rec. 1'30'' very easy

6x5' @3.23/22 rec. 1'30'' very easy

On Saturday I’d like to do 8x3'. I think the right pace is around @3.18 but i've to do an attempt.

Just for clarification, I'm not pushing any brand or anything. I have been offered before by a western running brand, but they were very clear I would have to say only positive things about their shoes. I'm not prepared to do that, or be disingenuous. I don't know about being a people's "champion", but I certainly am only here to help, not sell anyone else's products. I already feel bit guilty about potentially selling a book, but really I think that's the only way to really draw a line under things and have my final say, so I can vanish back into obscurity......

For what it's worth , not all Chinese shoes are great, much like western running brands. But having said that, even the bad ones you aren't paying much for. The good ones are so good, it's clear the western or mainstream brands are robbing the regular hobby jogger blind.

Following up on my negative experience with the sirpoc method I posted on page 289. In summary I was slowing down for 9 weeks straight then gave up on it. I learned about two months later that my ferritin was 26, after I been supplementing for those two months (50mg/4days per week). So I don't want anyone to lump me in with non responders to this method, rather I was just anemic.

I'm also just coming out of two weeks of going swiftly backwards due to anemia. There probably is an above average chance of becoming anemic with this style of training since it seems to be good for improving hematological values--which is obviously a positive, but it comes with the pitfall of possible anemia. I remember that when I investigated the "normal" Norwegian training a few years ago, one of the Ingebrigtsens mentioned that they needed to supplement a lot of iron due to their training. Presumably we should conclude the same about the B vitamins as well.

I don’t think is accurate. The full Norwegian method, like any other pro training program, is extremely high intensity and volume. That’s probably where the risk of iron deficiency. As an aside, iron deficiency among runners is usually present without anemia, as anemia is a full blown health condition that’s way less common among runners than just iron deficiency. When people say anemia I think they normally just mean iron deficiency. They shouldn’t be used interchangeably because they’re just too different.
I think the opposite is true. The Norwegian singles method leads to less iron deficiency than traditional training methods. I don’t have the link to this, but the head coach at Villanova (former Irish record holder I think, coaches multiple top ncaa runners, one of few programs that does the Norwegian method) presented about endurance training and mentioned that VO2 Max training can lead to iron depletion, which would seem to indicate that threshold training depleted iron to a much smaller extent.
Something else mentioned in that presentation that might be of use to this thread but is really off topic is that he subtracts 45 seconds from the bringing of threshold reps to find its effect versus continuous threshold. I wonder why this hasn’t been talked about here. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t make sense, but it might be something worth thinking about.

I can't find this exact question asked earlier, sorry if I'm repeating a question. What are the best shoes to do threshold workouts in when the consideration is "what shoes allow me to do the most amount of threshold work without over training"? A lot of the most popular shoes seem to come with significant tradeoffs, because I think the benefit of supershoes or supertrainers is the ability to reduce impact force from good energy return andgood cushioning. I also think that as someone who over pronates, and for logistical reasons has to warm up in the shoes I do my workouts in, I likely need to be wearing shoes that are somewhat stable and won't injure me if I jog 4 miles in then.

I can't seem to find shoes that do all there of these things; the saucony endorphin speed line really under-priotizies forefoot cushioning and therefore in my experience offers little to no real recovery benefit versus clunky trainers, super shoes that are relatively stable are too expensive when their durability is considered, the superblast I'm pretty sure doesn't have enough energy return to help with recovery that much (correct me if I'm wrong), and adios evo sl is probably too unstable.

Do any of the chinese supershoes or supertrainers meet these needs? I probably can't afford to buy chinese supertrainers that aren't exceptionally durable or cheap because these shoes aren't that much cheaper than non chinese shoes because I'm american ):

My assumptions (worthless as they may be) would be:
- runners need more iron than non-runners due to foot-strike hemolysis (mechanical damage/destruction to the red blood cells passing through your feet each foot-strike)
- it would stand to reason that the faster you run, the harder the foot-strike
- the harder the foot-strike, the more damaging it is to your red blood cells.
- the longer you run, the more you damage (i.e. more foot-strikes = more damage)
- different people are different, so how much this affects individuals and at what paces is probably individualistic.

If the above assumptions are true, then a single VO2 Max workout could certainly be more damaging than a single subthreshold workout.

BUT, going from 1xthreshold/tempo + 1xVO2Max workout to 3xsub-threshold workouts (or 4 + X-factor in Norwegian Doubles as someone mentioned above) per week could increase the total amount of hemolysis, even if the amount per workout is less. This could especially be true for individuals particularly susceptible to foot-strike hemolysis.

All that to say, regardless of how you are training, if you are doing any decent amount of running you should probably check/supplement iron.

Apologies, I don’t understand this point, can you explain further?

For those in the UK, what is the best way to arrange a ferritin test? Contact GP? Go to private clinic? Buy a self administered test kit? Etc.