Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Damn, son. Fully on board with a 2:20 in London next year now.

Chinese shoes cheat?

65 pages into the book and it really is way more detailed than I expected.

The recommendations on pace adjustment for hills/wind/temperature are eye-opening and as another poster said, probably worth the £15.99 alone.

It has me questioning my own intensities, lately I have been running my ST sessions on a 1.4km loop with 22m of net elevation gain/loss. According to sirpoc I should be running ~11s/km slower than I should in ideal, flat conditions, and that's before accounting for wind. Lately I've been running them within the lactrace pace ranges i.e. way too fast and my legs have been feeling a bit cooked. Time to dial it back and swallow my pride!

Also enjoying the detail. I'm glad sirpoc put this stuff in because I've seen him try and explain this to people, but nobody seems to listen. Sometimes people post on his Strava and ask why the paces are off and he has to explain you can't just use pace as a proxy, but not consider X day might be different to Y. Nobody ever seems to listen. It's also why the book is good, as it's cleared a lot up that gets lost in the endless questions.

The actual pacing for racing section is the bit I learned the most from and it will totally reshape how I think about racing. It makes absolute sense yet I've never really been able to stop myself messing it up. That part alone is going to make me a better runner.

I also like the explanation of how he knows his goal pace beforehand, also insanely helpful. All in all it's for real one of the best running books I've read, just finished it.

It promises you no miracles but gives you every single tool as a hobby guy or gal to give yourself the best chance in all you do, training and racing. I feel it's the first running book I've read that is aimed specifically at me. An OK , but not great runner who is willing to work to get better.

Again, just look at how he raced today. Sensibly, disciplined and gets the job done. Almost guaranteed performance and now he's a national champion. Chapeau, sir.

Very long time lurker who, felt the need to post.

Met sirpoc today whilst waiting for the medal ceremony at the cafe in the park. Really top bloke!! Just a totally normal guy who finds the whole thing quite ridiculous! Seemed more interested in my run than his! He just wins a national championship beating some top national masters runners and just seems so not fussed by it all!

But even picking his brains for 10 minutes, you can tell he really knows what makes good running and just has a sharp mind for what is important to the likes of us and what isn't. I saw a few people having a chat to him, maybe one day he will finally get used to it....

Book ordered, even heard a few people talking about it in the café. Delighted to break 17 myself today, thanks to almost a year of training in this method, never felt better even in my old age! I'm only 12 seconds off my lifetime pb now at double the age I set it at. Obviously, shoes are a factor but I feel I have reversed the curve of decline significantly. If I'm feeling like torturing myself, I also think that I have enough of this training under my belt to upskill myself with the marathon plan. The book will be really worth the money alone for me to read through that chapter.

Excited to hear about the pacing stuff in it, sounds great. i looked at his HR graph on Strava and the splits just now, that is really how you win a championship race! I asked him if he could have gone sub 15, he seemed to think probably and did consider it around halfway, but just sat knowing he was feeling super strong and pretty sure he could go a km or so out and drop the leaders. He said he was weighing up the risk of going for both in real time. How anyone can think all that through and weigh it all up in the middle of a race, is beyond my comprehension!

Great event and really well put on. We are really lucky in the UK to have such a good masters organisation that put on really well run events for us old gits. And a truly deserved champion to end the year for all the other distances. 10k is on Chichester just up the road in early 2026......just saying!

More importantly, did he have Chinese shoes on? Legit interested if the dude just won his national masters champs in adiclogs. If he did, I don't even think I know running anymore.

Good lord, so you guys needed a book to understand the need to adjust your pace to the conditions you're running in? I thought writing the book would be waste of time, but maybe its needed since common sense seems to be uncommon in this cult.

Of course not, I have already been adjusting paces to be slower but the magnitude that the paces need to be dialled back is what surprised me. For example, I target 3:35/km on the 3 minute reps. My loop consists of some short hills followed by a long gentle decline. Lately I've been backing up the pace to ~3:50/km on the uphills and speeding up the downhills to 3:30/km for an average of 3:35 - 3:40/km within each rep, however this text has shown me that even that is way too quick. Throw in wind as well and I should really be targeting 3:45 - 3:50/km on average on most days.

I still don’t understand why people keep trying to calculate lots of corrections to stuff. Just use HR surely. Over the long term, the errors will cancel out. There is no way that using HR is more error prone than trying to manually compensate pace for wind or elevation. You’re just substituting one type of error for another, and making it much more complicated than necessary. Even correcting pace for rep length seems unnecessary to me. You’ll never prove that is more efficacious than not doing it in real world training. If you are generally bought into the mantra of:

total training load

don’t overcook your reps

recover on easy runs properly

… then don’t worry about the tiny corrections

This is another thing, even with my minor corrections I found my HR was still well below my LTHR, but my legs still felt pretty fatigued the next day.

The book has an interesting graph showing that HR outside only has a medium correlation with LT2. The correlation is better indoors on a treadmill but still not perfect, and not as good as pace.

I use HR on the treadmill sometimes, but it's just really messy outside. That's always been my experience in 20+ years of using one. It's very variable in my experience, it's hard to change the workout or actually use it really in real time. Imagine racing to HR? That would be insane and I can't imagine anyone who is good at pacing does that. So I prefer to use pace for training as well, which is really what is going to shape a race for you.

As others have pointed out, it's really not difficult to work out what pace ranges should be day to day. Takes 30 seconds or even less to work out it what your target is that day. Since I've been doing this, my pacing then in racing is also so much better, so I see it as part of the hollisitc approach. I suppose it just really depends if you care about the other small marginal benefits you can get?

A lot of this method comes down to personal preference, in terms of how much you want to invest in these small things. I don't think there's any right or wrong, in terms of how far you take it. You can still get huge benefits just going on HR and setting a cap well below LTHR, but i would guess you might leave something on the table and I doubt it would help you with racing. That's just my opinion, but I fully accept I might be wrong or in the minority.

But I do assume it's a given, that everyone is using pace and the effects of conditions to pitch a workout, right at the start, even if they then use her to guide. Just about everyone must have some idea of roughly what pace they are aiming for on a given day, even if HR is their chosen proxy for lactate, when you consider the lag/drift and also the time it takes to catch up through the reps which can be inconsistent. So even then, you will be taking note of any changes in wind, temp etc. I think that's a given, at least?

I think i used to agree with this, sort of do now, but have totally dumped HR and find if I adjust paces as required, i can control the feeling a lot better than when i was using HR. I've tested lactate a lot as well myself and find pace over HR generally has the better correlation, although not perfect. That sealed it for me. But either or, probably works in general. I don't see it as really even worth the debate, if one works for one guy, over another.

My copy of the book should arrive tomorrow. I’m going to take my time reading it, rather than rushing through it in a day.

If you are running the same general conditions, having also tested lactate myself:

Lactate>pace>HR is how I would guide my sessions.

In general I test at the end of the first rep, pitched on the conservative side. Ignore HR, then work the next reps on pace, based on that reading. If you do this, you will likely dial it in more. HR could really muck up your day, at either end of the spectrum. Unless it really is something drastic at polar ends of the scale , I'm just ignoring HR. I can have had too much coffee, not enough coffee and it can swing HR hugely. Would just be having wildly varied sessions if I was listening to it.

My experience of HR training (and racing) is that for “aerobic” distances it’s pretty much bang on. I’ve raced with a chest strap on too. I know I can hold 91 % of max HR for an hour, as I’ve done it in a race. I know I can feel lactate accumulate at 93%+ max HR, as I’ve done it for faster reps and 5 km races. Believing that your body and HR suddenly gets into a special race mode and deviates from training is fantasy. OK there is a lag for short reps and this makes 400m reps, for example, troublesome for HR. Don’t go off too quickly (in training or racing). I try to cap all my sub-t reps at 87 % max HR but I know on the flat that is generally sitting at 3:30 per km, so will ease back if I’ve misjudged the beginning of the rep and gone off a bit quick. I keep an eye on HR because a live in a hilly area, sometimes there is wind, and sometimes I feel a bit under the weather, or some other reason my body won’t hit the target pace at a sensible HR.

You can choose to ignore HR and try to fix on pace, but the end training result will be similar over the long term IMO. Practically, for me, HR is so accessible and simple. Maybe if I did all my training on a treadmill I’d do pace. Saying you want to squeeze marginal gains out of sweet spot training makes no sense to me. I’d rather do more volume than think about adjusting reps by small percentages in pace. Might as well start throwing in strides, a few hill reps, plyos….

This is a great post. I just finished the book, I had it yesterday so had a chance to absorb it over about 36 hours now. It's fantastic, by the way. Far beyond my expectations and I was someone who didn't see the need. I was wrong. It's going to, as well as already, seemingly found it's place in the market and rightly so.

But as the above, I actually really agree! One thing became clear, sirpoc using pace as his proxy was 1) was probably the best way to correlate his lactate levels anyway (I know that can vary person to person) but 2) he's using pace as a proxy, but, in effect, to practice pacing for races (at slower speeds).

That in turn, makes his performance better and why he is perhaps the best pacer we have seen (plus his time trial background). By using consistent target paces, he's then also identified a range of those paces at Subthreshold that scale up to target race pace across distances. One thing leads to another and I've never really pieced that advantage together until now.

To me this is a massively overlooked HUGE advantage to using pace as a proxy. You almost know your fitness level, going into a race. The book does a waaaaaaay better job of explaining it than I have just massacred though, I'm sure.

I have looked at HR in a marathon, but a 5k surely it's pointless? Which is itself hugely aerobic. Nobody is really guiding a 5k off HR, are they? Of maybe misunderstanding this post.

I hope a mod deletes this troll thread. 400 pages of the same principles: 1. Don’t be an idiot in training. 2. Have periodization so that you can improve. Just common sense.

But its not is it.
1. whats a idiot in training, because others have said this is what we all have been doing all along?
2. we aren’t doing periodisation are we unless its the marathon.
think you might need to buy the book Josh

Definitely hasn't been what I have been doing all along, in fact most coaches have given me stuff I've hated. I doubt many people have actually trained like this long term, on the scale we see people doing now and certainly not been kind enough to lay it all out for idiots like most of us are.

I'm probably about the same level now on NSM, as when I was coached, on less intensity and I'm much older and I laugh back at the coaches who told me how important periodization was. It's certainly important for some, but not for old clobbing hobby joggers.