Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Are you sure about that?

Despite the fact that this thread is littered with sh*te, it also has produced a wealth of interesting content

I my experience that might be due to having very little moderation.

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You just have to look to something like r/advancedrunning on Reddit, where half the posts that Sirpoc comments in are removed for violating some rule or others

I'm guessing this thread would be removed too .. If nothing else because it contains too much cycling starting with Sirpoc and most recently HourofPower?

R/advancedrunning sucks because there’s very little participation from anyone that really knows their stuff and puts serious effort into it. This thread would stay up but it wouldn’t get the quality discussion that is possible on Letsrun.

Any lightly or unmoderated running subreddit is even worse.

The NSA subreddit is almost entirely unmoderated and it still sucks. It’s 99% helmet posts.

It’s the user base and structure of Reddit that’s the issue, not the moderation.

Point them here anyways but just give them a heads up about the issues. Anyone who wants to learn everything there is to about training needs to learn how the deal with sifting through Letsrun threads.

People seem to think being "fast" is enough to be classed as an "advanced runner" but many of the posters on there have really under performed at the longer distances.

People don't want to run slow, they all want to follow JD or Pfitz exactly as prescribed and if you comment to slow it down or skip a workout you get attacked. Mentioned NSM and you're laughed at.

I'm a former intensity but. I hold my hands up. But that's what advanced running loves. About 9 months ago I saw a post that both sirpoc and Jiggymeister replied to. They were probably the most useful posts on the thread. It was about long term development but they were largely brushed over and the comment with the most likes and positive response, was do some max sprints once a week. In a thread about long term development lol

Well what events did the poster run? If they ran the 800 or even the 1500 top speed would definitely be a limiting factor.

Obviously top speed can't be trained as well as aerobic capacity but I feel like people on here conflate hard anaerobic work and top speed work. Even if they did run longer events, is running 4 x 20m fly really going to be bad for long term development? 4 x 20m fly would be 20 minutes of rest and like 150 meters of running.

I think when people on here hear about max sprints they imagine someone running 100m all out, resting for 10 seconds, then running 50 more and sh*tting and vomiting. I don't understand the ardent opposition to speed development on here. Any sane person would agree that almost all runners don't need to do speed development to improve, but at a certain point the 20 minutes it takes to knock out a speed development session it probably more valuable than 20 minutes of easy running. Like what's wrong with this?

M: Easy
T: Sub T
W: Easy and brief speed development
T: Sub T
F: Easy and beer
S: Sub T
S: Long

Like maybe the second Sub T session would be slower, but that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. If I run a 5k at 60% of my top speed how could improving my top speed by 2% not have a positive impact on 5k time, if I still have the strength to run at 60% of my top speed?

What are helmet posts?

I'm not fast (Turkey Trot was 6:11 at 5 miles) and recently coming back from an injury, so I wanted to give this a shot.

My pace to keep my HR under 70% was literally 10:45 minute miles lol. Is this normal?? I'm admittedly a bit out of shape, but damn! This is super humbling. I hope the pace picks up soon. I am admittedly a little self conscious running this slow lol. It also doesn't mechanically feel that great.

Depends how long you were out injured, and how frequently you run. Everyone returns to fitness at different speeds.

For me I took a year off (17 min 5k runner) and when I came back I felt crap, I couldn't even drop a 4:00 kilometre. My "easy" runs were at 80% of max HR but were 9-10 minute miles. I purposefully did no speed work in the first 4-5 weeks so the 70% limit wasn't a concern initially. Once I built up to 6 days a week of easy running I started to follow it religiously and began sprinkling in the sub-threshold work. After about 8 weeks I was able to do 8-9 minute miles under 70% MHR, after 16 weeks I was dropping lifetime PRs again.

The thread in question was a HM runner.

I don't think anyone is against speed (see my posts, I actually did an experiment adding it in for a reasonably long period) and didn't see success. Because it doesn't add much. Each week of 3x sub threshold as is, probably adds more.

It's pure maths really. You can't fit everything in. You have to give something up as a hobby jogger and giving up speed development is just one of the things that makes sense as it has the least impact of our development. My results and others running 800-1500 seem to back that up.

Note: I'm not arguing this would be the case for an elite runner.

I think it would help if people calculated the difference between their 400m pace and 5km/10km/hm whatever, I know for me at least that the 400m pace is disproportionate faster, when comparing with different professionals. I have no problem running the speed required for several years of progress in 5/10/hm. Most likely my 400m pace will get better by just running more, as well.

If a pro with a comparable 400m/10km pace ratio as me (and many hobbyjoggers) focused on sprint speed people would call them crazy.

All this new talk about speed development opened my eyes to the fact that people don't realize how fast sirpoc got off just spamming vanilla NSM. His 10k PB of 30:40 which converts to like a 14:45 5k is roughly an age grade performance of 92.39%. this would be the equivalent of a 20 year old running 13:52! which would be the natural lifetime ceiling of a slightly above average talented athlete. Now I'm not an NSM purist but it's insanity to me that someone could theoretically run a sub 14 5k off this before they would need to start thinking about their top speed inhibiting improvement

Yet another question on training paces that is more of a sanity check for myself. The Book says:

-3' reps at 12-15km race pace;

-6' reps at 20km race pace;

-10' reps at 25-30km race pace.

Now, it probably doesn't matter much, but 20km race pace is around 85' minutes for a 40:00 10k runner, while it's closer to 65' for Sirpoc. The gap is even higher for 25-30km race pace (around 130' vs 100' for 30km). So, my paces are a bit shifted towards shorter races, while HR and RPE have felt very reasonable so far. For instance, I end up running 3' reps closer to 10k pace.

Is it normal? Or, am I overcooking it?

I agree with you on paper and I always thought basic speed development (not hard anaerobic intervals) was important for distance runners (especially for those who are not "naturally" fast). However,there is the injury risk which is the major worry for this type of workout especially past age 30 years and even more so for masters runners aged over 40 or 50 years (a lot of whom are reading this thread). If you tear a hamstring or a calf doing your flying 20m then you could be unable to run for at least a month even for a small tear, and your average GP or physio is not going to be of much use in helping you do the right rehab to get you back as quickly as possible. Repeat that just a few times and you are going to lose a lot of consistency over the long term. Maybe there is a way to do the sprints "safely" but if someone does not know how to do this then injury risk is definitely something to be wary of.

Bellends AKA clueless twats

Just use table 1.4 on page 51 of the book. Everything is scaled linearly, for example every 5 seconds/km increase in 5k pace corresponds to a second/km increase in pace for the 3 min reps.

Not just that. Cheetodust specifically does shorter races and his age grade for say 1500 is probably even higher (he's older). No speed development just spammed sub threshold and a 7th day (Monday easy) cross training.

As I posted before, I used to be quite sensationalist about how important speed development is but will concede I was wrong on this.

Like the other poster, I took nearly a year off from running and first got used to running 7 days per week running at whatever pace I felt like. Then I gradually mixed in sub-t. I think this made the transition a lot easier, but I think you will find that almost everyone who has adopted this method will tell you that mastering easy runs at below 70% mhr was a huge challenge initially. Most of us have never run that slow before in our lives.

So yes, I'd say it's normal and you'll get used to it in a couple of weeks and your paces will likely improve as your fitness improves.

I kind of like & prefer the reddit sub.

LR - there's some good content but it gets buried so quickly & topics change so fast. A lot of posts I wish I copied & pasted in a doc that I wish I could read again. Someone will bring up an interesting study (like the one about easy runs less than 75% not being effective). You'll maybe get 1 response & topic has changed. But then you have the never ending debates about Stryd etc.

Strava - I like being able to view profiles to see who is responding. Is it someone that's been doing this for 2 weeks or 2 years giving advice? Though seems about 1/2 the people make their profiles private for some reason, which is annoying. Good posts/discussions also get buried & it takes awhile to scroll endlessly to find them.

Reddit - the most organized & easy to save a discussion to come back to later. Sure there are a lot of newbie questions but what do you expect. I've made a couple posts on there & received a lot of good & quick replies. Even sirpoc replied to both.