Is "DANCAN" a portmanteau of Daniels and Canova by chance?
Yes , DAN- iels and CAN-ova . DANCAN! 😃
I came up with the name when I figured out what to call my training method. It's a mix between five of history's greatest coaches , Canova, Daniels , Gerschler, Stampfl and Lydiard and "laced" with my own specialities.....
Because mixing and matching five completely different mutually exclusive training methodologies is bound to work, just because…
sure if I take the one that says only run moderately hard for long durations and the other which is only hard vo2max for short durations that clearly are designed to work together but wait there’s more… I will take some arbitrary number that represents by zone 1 heart rate regardless of an individual or the conditions I’m running in as my recover set and then despite doing long and “slow” and hard and very fast I also need to be specific for my races which could be anything from 800m to 50km.
No wonder everyone you coach gets slower or at worst pretends to do your workouts and is coached by other people, or you claim to coach athletes who don’t even know you, who remember poor sammy?
Mate, either give a synopsis of your training methodology rather than names so we can critique or otherwise give it a rest with your spamming of this thread with trash posts saying you are the greatest without saying anything.
Tell your approach for elite you are coaching now, who failed his last race and was slower than his training and the one of the hobby joggers so we can help you
I came up with the name when I figured out what to call my training method. It's a mix between five of history's greatest coaches , Canova, Daniels , Gerschler, Stampfl and Lydiard and "laced" with my own specialities.....
Because mixing and matching five completely different mutually exclusive training methodologies is bound to work, just because…
sure if I take the one that says only run moderately hard for long durations and the other which is only hard vo2max for short durations that clearly are designed to work together but wait there’s more… I will take some arbitrary number that represents by zone 1 heart rate regardless of an individual or the conditions I’m running in as my recover set and then despite doing long and “slow” and hard and very fast I also need to be specific for my races which could be anything from 800m to 50km.
No wonder everyone you coach gets slower or at worst pretends to do your workouts and is coached by other people, or you claim to coach athletes who don’t even know you, who remember poor sammy?
Mate, either give a synopsis of your training methodology rather than names so we can critique or otherwise give it a rest with your spamming of this thread with trash posts saying you are the greatest without saying anything.
Tell your approach for elite you are coaching now, who failed his last race and was slower than his training and the one of the hobby joggers so we can help you
I don't want to explain my method to persons like you telling preconceived lies here about my coaching.If someone here seriously interested in my method you are welcomed to contact me .
*I* am seriously interested, at least conceptually.
Could you please describe, in general terms, how you might design a training program for someone such as myself, i.e., a 40(+) y old who would like to lower their 5k PB of 17:18 during 2026? I don't have a lot of time and energy to devote to my goal, roughly 8 hours per week maximum.
Just thought I would run an update, as I posted a while back and had been slightly disappointed by not making progress. I had come off two relative back to back Daniels builds, so I was struggling to run truly easy i think on my nsm easy days. Lots of comments I took to heart when they were posted, but retrospectively you guys were correct.
I was still at 18:33 as a pb even after 4 months but definitely the easy paces were just too hard. Towards 75% of mhr. I felt tired still. Always
Anyway, I went away and i have done 17 straight weeks of absolutely NSM vanilla. Not had a single day off, finally running about 65% mhr most days for easy. Had no idea where I was at, ran my local Xmas day parkrun today.
Ran 17:47 and I think I had more left in the tank. In fact I know I did, negative splits to the extreme. Haven't ran even remotely close to 3:30-35/km pace in training. But, there it was. Crazy.
Double good day, wife got me the book for Xmas and also having spent a good hour or so flicking through that whilst the kids burn themselves out, love it!
Haopy Christmas everyone, even Jan despite trying to ruin the thread.
When you ran your 17:47 and came thru the finish did you feel like you could have run another 3-5 mins at that effort? Have heard similar stories about 5k NSM.
That you ran 3:30km pace without touching those in training is wild.
Just thought I would run an update, as I posted a while back and had been slightly disappointed by not making progress. I had come off two relative back to back Daniels builds, so I was struggling to run truly easy i think on my nsm easy days. Lots of comments I took to heart when they were posted, but retrospectively you guys were correct.
I was still at 18:33 as a pb even after 4 months but definitely the easy paces were just too hard. Towards 75% of mhr. I felt tired still. Always
Anyway, I went away and i have done 17 straight weeks of absolutely NSM vanilla. Not had a single day off, finally running about 65% mhr most days for easy. Had no idea where I was at, ran my local Xmas day parkrun today.
Ran 17:47 and I think I had more left in the tank. In fact I know I did, negative splits to the extreme. Haven't ran even remotely close to 3:30-35/km pace in training. But, there it was. Crazy.
Double good day, wife got me the book for Xmas and also having spent a good hour or so flicking through that whilst the kids burn themselves out, love it!
Haopy Christmas everyone, even Jan despite trying to ruin the thread.
When you ran your 17:47 and came thru the finish did you feel like you could have run another 3-5 mins at that effort? Have heard similar stories about 5k NSM.
That you ran 3:30km pace without touching those in training is wild.
What was your taper like?
That's seems to be the question: how much faster than your regular training paces can you run before biomechanics becomes a limiting factor?
Here's my theory: no matter how fast/fit you are, there comes a point at which the neuromuscular demands of running faster than your training pace is an issue. It therefore follows that to run as fast as your fitness might allow, you must occasionally run faster than that.
Okay, how much? My answer would be that although weekly strides may not be needed, to maximize performance over 800-5000 metres, you need to at least tickle those paces for 3-6 weeks beforehand.
Rationale: 1) running economy matters, and 2) neuromuscular adaptations are rapid.
When you ran your 17:47 and came thru the finish did you feel like you could have run another 3-5 mins at that effort? Have heard similar stories about 5k NSM.
That you ran 3:30km pace without touching those in training is wild.
What was your taper like?
That's seems to be the question: how much faster than your regular training paces can you run before biomechanics becomes a limiting factor?
Here's my theory: no matter how fast/fit you are, there comes a point at which the neuromuscular demands of running faster than your training pace is an issue. It therefore follows that to run as fast as your fitness might allow, you must occasionally run faster than that.
Okay, how much? My answer would be that although weekly strides may not be needed, to maximize performance over 800-5000 metres, you need to at least tickle those paces for 3-6 weeks beforehand.
Rationale: 1) running economy matters, and 2) neuromuscular adaptations are rapid.
or just do a race
that was the initial inception of all of this early on
if youre doing a 5k race every 3-4 weeks, good to go
When you ran your 17:47 and came thru the finish did you feel like you could have run another 3-5 mins at that effort? Have heard similar stories about 5k NSM.
That you ran 3:30km pace without touching those in training is wild.
What was your taper like?
That's seems to be the question: how much faster than your regular training paces can you run before biomechanics becomes a limiting factor?
Here's my theory: no matter how fast/fit you are, there comes a point at which the neuromuscular demands of running faster than your training pace is an issue. It therefore follows that to run as fast as your fitness might allow, you must occasionally run faster than that.
Okay, how much? My answer would be that although weekly strides may not be needed, to maximize performance over 800-5000 metres, you need to at least tickle those paces for 3-6 weeks beforehand.
Rationale: 1) running economy matters, and 2) neuromuscular adaptations are rapid.
and actually this is a point of agreement: it takes some time to get to peak performance through racing
I vaguely remember sirpoc saying there was a particular user on the time trialling forums that had very insightful posts - sirpoc's sirpoc essentially. Does anyone remember what the username was? I'm curious to check out their old posts but I can't remember where this was mentioned, it might be buried in the Strava group or somewhere in this thread.
Could be wrong, but I think it was tarmacexpert over on the UK time trialling forum. Only 11000+ posts there to scroll through.
When you ran your 17:47 and came thru the finish did you feel like you could have run another 3-5 mins at that effort? Have heard similar stories about 5k NSM.
That you ran 3:30km pace without touching those in training is wild.
What was your taper like?
That's seems to be the question: how much faster than your regular training paces can you run before biomechanics becomes a limiting factor?
Here's my theory: no matter how fast/fit you are, there comes a point at which the neuromuscular demands of running faster than your training pace is an issue. It therefore follows that to run as fast as your fitness might allow, you must occasionally run faster than that.
Okay, how much? My answer would be that although weekly strides may not be needed, to maximize performance over 800-5000 metres, you need to at least tickle those paces for 3-6 weeks beforehand.
Rationale: 1) running economy matters, and 2) neuromuscular adaptations are rapid.
I was prepping for a mile. The week prior, on my Saturday session, I did 3x2k-4x200 @ Mile. My Tuesday session on race week was in the bin from sickness. Thursday session was 1600-2x800 @ sub T, 2x400m-4x200m. Pre-meet on Saturday did 2x150m builds. Had more than enough speed for the mile on Sunday. However, I do lift and do plyos pretty regularly, so getting in touch with speed wasn't the worst for me. I'd say 2 weeks out for an 800 or Mile.
I don't want to explain my method to persons like you telling preconceived lies here about my coaching.If someone here seriously interested in my method you are welcomed to contact me .
So you don’t want to have open and honest discussion on training methodologies to understand what, why and what could be done better, instead just sales pitches for your business then which this thread is not about.
maximum your aerobic ability through consistent load for lower risk fatigue and high opportunity aerobic gains for a time poor athlete which does this as a hobby which is typically a master / veteran runner.
Well, I can't say I belittle the work of runners have improved by this tweak of the Norwegian double thresholds . I'm happy for you! 🙏🖐😃🧙♂️ But I'm convinced these guys had very poor training and didn't have a clue how to perfectly train with a mix of VO2max and LT 2 in their weeks before they jumped on the NSM. And the 'Godfather' had already a very high endurance engine from subelite cycling and some critics pointed out that he sometimes ran maxVO2 and LT2 thresholds as well when suposed to run subthresholds.
Some guys before in the thread asked the critics for a better method on low mileage giving faster and sustained improvement and now I have partly given it here with the Dancan System of mine. It's absolutely impossible to reach one's optimum best possible running results without faster training paces than subthresholds 3 times per week. That's a fact, and I can say with 100% sureness for every runner has improved with this NSA method I had improved every one of them atleast as fast in shorter time. Yes, I know , you will downvote me because I say against the majority here, but there are only a few here with my longtime experience of running testing out myself in practise the most famous methods in history as a national elite runner and now last 10 years successful coaching ( really successful even if some stalkers here want to twist that claim) .I'm as I say happy for the guys have improved with the NSM , but you should never believe this is the the very best low mileage method ever....
Coach J.S , Swedish pro online running coach . 🇸🇪🧙♂️🇸🇪
Having seen huge gains as an older runner using NSM, it's finally happened. Jan is finally here and made the comment I almost knew was going to happen. That any success of NSM is down to poor training before.
I had a coach. I was hit with what I consider a pretty intense schedule, quite vo2 heavy and a day off. I found this coach on Facebook. It worked very well, for maybe 5-6 weeks, I actually felt decent, then quite quickly, it tailed off. Felt quite burned out even with the day off. Coach was telling me "this is normal." Didn't really make any progress, just another textbook 'boom and bust ' cycle.
That coach.....was Jan!!! You couldn't write it. Since then I've done about 15 months of NSM and taken 97 seconds off my lifetime 5K and topped it up with my first ever sub 2:45 marathon.
So yes, maybe it's true I didn't have a clue how to train vo2 sessions, due to your guidance! You cannot make this up. It's, beautiful.
P.s I'm sure Jan will deny all this. That's how he works. I was one of the posters concerned on the big Jan megathread a while back, who said how Jan had contacted me on 'runners love running' page i seem to remember it was, on Facebook.
Red flags for me was when I googled him, found the Letsrun thread and then it turned out he was claiming to coach a girl called "Emma" running remarkable times, who quite obviously turned out to be a high school boy or college guy. You only had to Google this name and it came up with a fake Facebook profile that was clearly a catfish and within about 2 minutes you could trace it back to this kid.
I asked him about this and he blocked me on Facebook almost immediately.
As ever, the 'everyone is out to get me' will be used by Jan. He has stalkers, all the rest. If I get all this from you Jan, I'll probably just end up going on the NSM Reddit group and dump all the messages and screenshots there. Although, you will still work out a way to "deny" this. Or perhaps you never coached me, like all the other people who have criticism of you , then gets claimed. Yet success stories, people you might have spoken to once, get claimed as 'disciples' of DANCAN, even though they have never got any recognition of even having heard of you.
I wish you all the best Jan, your enthusiasm for running is actually unparalleled and it actually is the attitute a good coach should have. But you cannot take criticism, you don't think outside of the narrow box and framework you believe in and honestly? I find you a little strange, even on direct messaging. You are no doubt a compulsive liar, which is a shame for a man of your age. It's not a good look.
Jan, I wish you well and hope you had a good Christmas, I think tou have some issues but maybe deep down you just wanted to be loved and respected, so it's hard to wish I'll of you. I do, however, wish you would get some help.
Sirpoc, by the way, congratulations on the book. Very, very good and informative, something that will be up there as a modern classic or running must have. Even if you aren't 100% sold on NSM, there's something in there for everyone to learn. It's great having a somewhat outsiders perspective of this strange sport we call running.
To the thread, thank you. I learned a lot in all my time reading here. This is as good as Letsrun gets, even if the thread can be frustrating at times (maybe Alfie has come around to Chinese shoes?!).