Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

shirtboy2022 wrote:

this could be it wrote:

"At the end which is all that matters". This could be it. I'll be honest, when it was clear sirpoc was building up to London I didn't think he had a hope in hell of running even 2:35 maybe six weeks out. The training legit seemed way too soft and conservative. But then 2:24 on that day, with relatively little mileage in a race where everyone else fell apart, was outrageous for a first marathon at his age.

So then I looked to how and why. The build kept him aerobically strong with just slightly extended NSM. Then when the time came, he basically added in a touch of specificity for the unique demands of a marathon. Are we basically saying for hobby joggers, staying fresh and going big at the end is really it? I think we might be. I agree, the damage seemingly for non elites is going way too big, too early, and then 6-8 weeks out you are already fried to a crisp.

honestly, too, talking to him right up until the day, you could tell the places he was going he wasn’t overcooked; the doubts were the mental side, which ultimately were a mirage

everyone in the circle going through the London build knew he was going to crush it, by how much was the guess

but the main idea was baked in: building fitness throughout and simply getting cute extending it, not what we see with too many Canova adherents: getting cute building the fitness, absolutely destroying themselves trying to extend that house of cards for 8-10 weeks into race day

cant get my head around wrote:

shirtboy2022 wrote:

exactly

youre mostly extending ‘time on feet’ and maybe slightly tweaking your metabolic profile in a round about way

but you can do it in a much narrower window and right up to the end because you haven’t spent weeks and weeks completely over your head trying just to survive

it obviously questions the modern paradigms of periodization and peaking, but those are being inverted constantly, especially by the country embedded in the name of this approach

the longer a race is the more ‘survival’ is going to be an aspect, but if you spent 20 weeks doing that already, you’re probably going to have some issues calling upon that if you have even the slightest adversity on race day (queue London ‘24)

My brain is struggling with this. This isn't a troll. But I'm finding it hard to understand. The guys putting themselves in the position to run the demands of a marathon on a regular basis, are less equipped than a guy who jogged around for 12 of 15 weeks in a marathon build? This bit I can't get my head around and flies in the face of just about all logic.

The problem being though, there's far too many people on here, Reddit and Strava all saying how this nsm marathon build had then fresher than ever. Often you read through the lines they are marathon vets. So there as so be logic even if I can't see it.

I just struggle that a random thread on Letsrun suddenly has shifted things seemingly and against a hell of a lot of trsdtiinal running advice.

John Whelan wrote:

Hyperbole of "jogging around aside" the rest of this is a valid question that I think gets at the heart of a common misunderstanding of training -failing to recognize that there can be a pretty big gap between the training we can physically complete vs. the relative adaptations we actually gain from it.

Training can be maladaptive without causing injury. Super-compensation is not a law of physics, it's a conceptual model used to simplify a very complex collection of biological processes. The collection of cellular signals we summarize as a training stimulus are not a mandate that the body will reliably follow, but rather a strongly worded suggestion for improvement. The capacity for improvement is dependent on the foundational fitness and lifestyle of the athlete.

The guys putting themselves through marathon demands regularly may be overreaching beyond what they have the capacity to adapt from. If we take a more extreme example this is an obvious problem -ultrarunners and long course triathletes have to train significantly short of fully race-specific demands. The tricky part about the marathon is that this boundary isn't as obvious and their is more temptation for overreaching.

The freshness aspect also shouldn't be ignored, it's certainly possible that part of this is just a training plan that allows people to express fitness better on raceday, and as you point out with the veterans some aspects of that fitness has likely been earned on previous "harder" training.

More broadly, often a hyper-specific focus on race-demands ignores how our physiology actually works.

John Whelan wrote:

cant get my head around wrote:

My brain is struggling with this. This isn't a troll. But I'm finding it hard to understand. The guys putting themselves in the position to run the demands of a marathon on a regular basis, are less equipped than a guy who jogged around for 12 of 15 weeks in a marathon build? This bit I can't get my head around and flies in the face of just about all logic.

The problem being though, there's far too many people on here, Reddit and Strava all saying how this nsm marathon build had then fresher than ever. Often you read through the lines they are marathon vets. So there as so be logic even if I can't see it.

I just struggle that a random thread on Letsrun suddenly has shifted things seemingly and against a hell of a lot of trsdtiinal running advice.

Hyperbole of "jogging around aside" the rest of this is a valid question that I think gets at the heart of a common misunderstanding of training -failing to recognize that there can be a pretty big gap between the training we can physically complete vs. the relative adaptations we actually gain from it.

Training can be maladaptive without causing injury. Super-compensation is not a law of physics, it's a conceptual model used to simplify a very complex collection of biological processes. The collection of cellular signals we summarize as a training stimulus are not a mandate that the body will reliably follow, but rather a strongly worded suggestion for improvement. The capacity for improvement is dependent on the foundational fitness and lifestyle of the athlete.

The guys putting themselves through marathon demands regularly may be overreaching beyond what they have the capacity to adapt from. If we take a more extreme example this is an obvious problem -ultrarunners and long course triathletes have to train significantly short of fully race-specific demands. The tricky part about the marathon is that this boundary isn't as obvious and their is more temptation for overreaching.

The freshness aspect also shouldn't be ignored, it's certainly possible that part of this is just a training plan that allows people to express fitness better on raceday, and as you point out with the veterans some aspects of that fitness has likely been earned on previous "harder" training.

More broadly, often a hyper-specific focus on race-demands ignores how our physiology actually works.

John Whelan wrote:

cant get my head around wrote:

My brain is struggling with this. This isn't a troll. But I'm finding it hard to understand. The guys putting themselves in the position to run the demands of a marathon on a regular basis, are less equipped than a guy who jogged around for 12 of 15 weeks in a marathon build? This bit I can't get my head around and flies in the face of just about all logic.

The problem being though, there's far too many people on here, Reddit and Strava all saying how this nsm marathon build had then fresher than ever. Often you read through the lines they are marathon vets. So there as so be logic even if I can't see it.

I just struggle that a random thread on Letsrun suddenly has shifted things seemingly and against a hell of a lot of trsdtiinal running advice.

Hyperbole of "jogging around aside" the rest of this is a valid question that I think gets at the heart of a common misunderstanding of training -failing to recognize that there can be a pretty big gap between the training we can physically complete vs. the relative adaptations we actually gain from it.

Training can be maladaptive without causing injury. Super-compensation is not a law of physics, it's a conceptual model used to simplify a very complex collection of biological processes. The collection of cellular signals we summarize as a training stimulus are not a mandate that the body will reliably follow, but rather a strongly worded suggestion for improvement. The capacity for improvement is dependent on the foundational fitness and lifestyle of the athlete.

The guys putting themselves through marathon demands regularly may be overreaching beyond what they have the capacity to adapt from. If we take a more extreme example this is an obvious problem -ultrarunners and long course triathletes have to train significantly short of fully race-specific demands. The tricky part about the marathon is that this boundary isn't as obvious and their is more temptation for overreaching.

The freshness aspect also shouldn't be ignored, it's certainly possible that part of this is just a training plan that allows people to express fitness better on raceday, and as you point out with the veterans some aspects of that fitness has likely been earned on previous "harder" training.

More broadly, often a hyper-specific focus on race-demands ignores how our physiology actually works.