Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

The previous mulebuy link for dowin pb pro is sold out in a lot of sizes. Anyone have a source for size 44+ EU please?

I’m a little bit quicker now than sirpoc was when he started posting his breakthroughs in this thread but doing 30 minute sessions I do about 8 - 8.4k at sub T intensity. I’ve read the entire thread but upon recently rereading the first few pages I see that sirpoc would have been doing 34 - 38 minutes per sub T session. I’d say the 3 x 3k session would have been around 34 min, 25 x 400 around 35 min, 10 x 1k and 6 x 1600 around 36 min and 5 x 2k around 38 mins. When did the system become 30 min per session? Is sirpoc trying to keep us all in a state of perpetually lower CTL than him?

Yes, that's exactly it. He's written hundreds of posts, meticulously published the last 4 years of his training on Strava, and written a book with comments from Marius Bakken, all to sabotage 1000s of runners on the internet. And you're the first person to figure it out. Well done.

I could be wrong, but I don't think sirpoc ever explicitly mentioned 30min per session. He may have said 'roughly 30 min' or something like that in an example, but he ran and runs distance-based repetitions. When slower runners (who couldn't run a 1k in ~3-4 minutes or a 3k in 10-12) started replicating his system, though, a lot altered it to time-based repetitions, and 10x3, 5x6, and 3x10 became common, not 10x3'42" or whatever it would have been at the start. Hence 30'/session.

Some people seem to get hung up on the 3 30 minute sessions or some other specific part of this, without really grasping the foundational principles, like individualizing and (very) gradually progressing load.

I do find it interesting that, as he got faster, sirpoc's sub T time would have, I think, shortened per week (until the marathon build), while his overall load increased through more easy running.

Christ, what a dullard. I’m being facetious but the underlying question has important implications for progressing load in the system. It’s become a truism in this thread that the people who’ve had the most success have followed “vanilla NSA”, which is a bit of a nebulous term but I believe, amongst other things, has come to mean 3 x 10, 5 x 6, 10 x 3. Not questioning the method at all I’m just seeking some clarification on this change over time but I can just wait for the book if your comment is any indication of the level of insight I’m likely to encounter

Hi guys, random person here. But I random messaged sirpoc on Strava as someone on 5 hours a week to ask this. His first ever week of training like this was 3x10, 5x5 and 8x3, without distance, after dropping the 90s which was x20. He very usually open to reply when he sees it, but assume he gets hundred of messages a week! When he first changed to distance for convenience for his own running, I believe 3 mins was 800 metres and the 5 was 1400.

He wasn't sure how far his Strava go back as he had watch problems uploading over wi fi, so it wasn't until he got more recent watch every run has actually uploaded but he has a log of it all somewhere. I guess he never cared as only recently anyone interested. He's gone from few friends as followers to thousands.

I think you would find he would agree with your post and I can only assume it's in book. There is nothing directly magic about sub threshold. It's just way to manage load. That is what he's said all along. 30 minute as a regular session, just seems to be the sensible point if you do 3 time week to manage most load. The real important part is management of the intensity and fatigue of how you use your 30 mins. There can be big difference in 30 mins straight tempo versus doing a sensible sub t day and being OK to do another 2 that week and still be fresh.

Sorry, hope my English not too bad, second language for me. Can't wait for book, will improve my running English language more :)

I was anger at first this thread talk about shoes, especially china like Alfie is angry all time. I'm grumpy old man like him to he he But then I got first pair the challenger 5. Then only anger I have is anger to myself that I spend money on western brand who steal from me all these years. Shame on them. Great shoe I won't buy western brand again.

Slowly but surely more people are coming around to this.

If you talk about chinese shoes to random runners they still write them off as "cheap knockoffs" and think of places like aliexpress and taobao as scam websites that aren't worth the risk.

Many simply refuse to believe that something like a challenger 5 for £40 is possible, much less that it's quality is superior to the top western trainers that cost north of £150.

More people are waking up to it though, I think this year was the watershed moment where chinese shoes surpassed their western counterparts in quality. Prior to this year they were about equal, so not considered to be worth the hassle of buying, but now they are becoming hard to ignore, especially given the price.

do Chinese shoes last as long though?

Why wouldn't they? Mine I got from this thread recommendation and are make of A-TPU which will last longer than zoom X peba. + The outsole is the kind of long lasting rubber you get on the adios pro 4. There's really no downside!

Also, thanks for this thread in general! Ran a parkrun huge pb today. 16:54. Vanilla full nsm for over a year. Took a while, no strides or anything below 3 mins reps. I was around a 18:30 guy when I started training like this. Lifetime pb was 17:11 in about 2014. Here is the thing, wore my Chinese shoes for the new pb.

Can't wait for the book by the way, to have it foreword by Bakken is genuine hype!

I recommend every also checks out BMAI Turbo 3.0.

It's a crazy cheap marathon racer that uses ATPU, same as Metaspeed Edge/Sky and the Puma Fast R 3.

They do kinda bottom out from 10km or faster though - well I don’t in my pair

Do - auto correct

How do you manage to bottom 29mm of forefoot stack? Are you pretty heavy?

If you write a post like a dip-stick edgelord, you might find you get in-kind responses. If you have a genuine question, you can read the first 5-10 pages of this thread, which lays most of it out, or ask your question genuinely.

Anyways: post #215 lays out more clearly what had already been said, but more clearly for dullards like myself.
I think I mentioned before, if I increase volume I will do it incrementally and proportionally to my 75/25 easy /sub threshold load. So it might be I add on 5 mins to all my easy runs and then that adds on maybe an extra rep somewhere to my sub threshold intervals

Just a question: would the challanger 5 be a good marathon shoe?

The Challenger 5 is like the Nike Zoomfly 6, except the bottom layer is TPE.

Thanks for the reference. So “vanilla” is 80/20 on 7.5 hours if you do 3 x 30 min sessions (60 total with breaks + warm up/cool down, 60 min easy days and a 90 min long run. It seems like sirpoc was at ~73/27 when he was at 6h 45 but that came down as total mileage increases. He mentioned that on the Dan Nash podcast.

I guess there’s probably a moving target range for % of weekly volume at sub T that could guide incremental increases in load from 5 to 9 hours where you might increase easy mileage until you’re at the bottom of the range before increasing sub-T volume to get to the top of the range and then rinse and repeat, using races as a sense check along the way.

I’m not sure uniform increases across the sessions is the way to go beyond 30 minutes. For me personally, I think there’s more headroom in the longer reps than the shorter ones. I think I recover a lot better from 4 x 10 mins than I do from 12 x 3 mins. The person who recently posted about their success with 25 x 1 min sessions is probably a good example of this.

I know some people re-test after 4-6 weeks, but is 6-10 more appropriate (5k/10k test) after a block of vanilla NSA (3E/3ST/1 LR no longer than 90).