Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

obturator wrote:

I'm more FT. Everyone's different but I respond best to longer reps/focus on my weakness. I've found the speed of the reps isn't that important as long as I don't run them too fast (much better to go a little slower for FT, & avoid going over threshold whereas it's not as risky for ST types.) I've often thought the people that'd benefit most from 1 min reps are the ST guys.

In high school XC I ran my best times at start of season during aerobic focus & with longer speed reps. Then when 400s were introduced later I stagnated & then declined, but the 400 reps weren't as hard for me in as others. About half the team improved with 400s/more speed stuff & 1/2 declined. Clear FT/ST divide? In track I raced 800s very well from doing 600 m reps in practice, & sometimes 400s. When we switched to 300 m near sprints I stagnated. Same thing with about 1/2 team improving with more speed & 1/2 stagnating.

I've wrote this before. It is confusing, because it seems like there are 2 schools of thought. I've read Magness & Bakken say FT runners should do shorter aerobic ish reps. But Hadd said FT runners should do longer reps, focus on their weakness, & run their easy runs a little easier than ST dudes.

Perhaps you could argue if shorter reps are easier for FT guys then they'd make weeks more repeatable with less stress to them & then they could tolerate more load?

Southcoastrunna wrote:

fasterwithage wrote:

Thanks for the message and I'm happy to help. Are you from Portsmouth? I've since moved to Dorset, but am still relatively local! Coming from a long course triathlon background and having trained 'a lot' to get to 5 x Kona qualifications, I was coming into this with a background of a lot of volume (aiming for ~1,000 TSS a week).

I turned 40 last year and, with work, family, life commitments, decided to try and run some decent masters times—as running takes a lot less time than triathlon if you want to be competitive. Prior to 2025 I would typically be in the boom or bust cycle of battling niggles and not being as consistent as I'd like.

I've ran PBs at all distances from the mile to the marathon this past year, following a version of the NSM, but I have doubled plenty of easy days and also tend to increase the easy volume to ensure the balance of easy is appropriate as I scale towards the marathon. Peak week was 90 miles.

For context, I ran a 2:37 in 2017 at London Marathon prior to carbon plated shoes. I used a plan by Steve Way. It worked well, but the two big days a week and aims of 100 mpw were much more risky. I was also 32 at the time and now 8 years on, to have run 2:34 at Valencia and 2:32 at Seville, shows the training is working, as whilst the shoes are undoubtedly worth a minute or two, I'm battling age and will be 41 this year. I feel the trend will continue as I'm aiming to run 2:29 or faster this year at London or Berlin.

I use Intervals.icu and hit a fitness score of 78 before Valencia and 76 before Seville, but have seen a gradual improvement in my threshold pace. I haven't really done any speedwork outside of strides before sessions and the odd race for a hard VO2 stimulus.

I think the consistent load and spreading the load is the key. I never felt totally fried in the build up and certainly didn't need a 3 week taper. I would have no concerns training like this for another marathon and just gradually adding a little more load here and there to nudge up the fitness to another level.

Thanks for this. Your progress has been really good as I sort of knew your background before, but started to really stand out. I am from Hampshire yes. I ran a couple of Lakeside's that both you and sirpoc were in. But this was way before anyone knew who he was and even I could beat him lol Sometimes I don't think people appreciate how low a starting point he was at for so long and if I'm beating you it's a very low bar lol

I guessed you were training like NSM from the sessions and have in retrospect seen you comment on each others Strava from time to time. Again, this is eye opening to me as you are like cheetodust, Wigglewaffle and a few others. Incredibly experienced athletes who in their own right have so much knowledge yet gravitate towards this and keep it very close to it's intended spirit and the results are clearly paying off. Another very fast guy who has set a mile PB off this. Interesting.

Good luck on sub 2:30 and hope you had a good time in Seville. I must try and get in for next year. Maybe it was you seen out with the man himself drinking up the streets of Seville! Brits abroad, eh? Give sirpoc a camera and a trip to a race weekend in Europe and I think we could get some of the best running YouTube content we have ever seen......

fasterwithage wrote:

Its important to remember that James was a very good time time trialist previously, who had a long hiatus from sport—so he was starting from a very low base in a new sport, but had very good potential, knows how to train, and knows what he responds well to in training.

In the past 9-10 months I've been very consistent and improved across the board, but as I was already training etc, the results are maybe less pronounced, but when you factor in age, its still a great example that this method works. i.e. 5k PB went from 15:49 to 15:33, 10k from 33:03 to 32:53, and marathon from 2:37, to 2:34, to 2:32.

Seville is a great race and yes, the man himself is a good mate and certainly doesn't take life too seriously! I think we could all take a leaf out of his book!

But you'll never likely see him on YouTube or promoting anything—everyone else will do that for him.

Nomore4s wrote:

For those like Paul Luttrell who are stagnating and looking for ways to increase load or add a different stimulus, has anyone considered adding periodization to the mix?

For example doing small blocks similar to the special marathon block. Where you trade one of the sub T sessions for a session with more intensity and/or more mileage. But only doing it for a 3-4 weeks, then reverting back to vanilla NSM for 5-6 weeks to recover and absorb the training and then repeating the process.

I do something similar leading up to my half marathon races, as I find I run better with some specific work leading up to goal races. These small blocks are manageable because they generally don’t last more than 4 weeks and lead into a 5-7 day taper before the race. It works well for me.

I’m I think a series of these mini blocks could provide some extra load and a different stimulus without absolutely burying yourself, and give you time to recover, absorb and adapt.

Wolfe wrote:

All the chat about FT vs. ST is completely overblown and unnecessary at the hobby level. This has already been discussed a couple of times throughout the thread. A lot of people that say things like “I’m clearly FT” are more often just aerobically undeveloped. I’d like to see everybody who claims to be FT post their 100/200/400 PBs but even then, PBs are hardly a good indicator of muscle fiber composition. That being said, most people claiming to be FT are probably doing so based on shorter distance PBs. I know guys that have run 23 second 200s, which sounds FT right? But they were also studs in cross country. I just don’t think it’s worth trying to change the plan because you think you’re FT. The reality is, most people are not FT, they’re mixed. Just to do Vanilla (or scaled down to your training load) for a couple of months at least.

fasterwithage wrote:

Its important to remember that James was a very good time time trialist previously, who had a long hiatus from sport—so he was starting from a very low base in a new sport, but had very good potential, knows how to train, and knows what he responds well to in training.

In the past 9-10 months I've been very consistent and improved across the board, but as I was already training etc, the results are maybe less pronounced, but when you factor in age, its still a great example that this method works. i.e. 5k PB went from 15:49 to 15:33, 10k from 33:03 to 32:53, and marathon from 2:37, to 2:34, to 2:32.

Seville is a great race and yes, the man himself is a good mate and certainly doesn't take life too seriously! I think we could all take a leaf out of his book!

But you'll never likely see him on YouTube or promoting anything—everyone else will do that for him.

Nomore4s wrote:

CTL viewer wrote:

If you look at the CTL/Fitness graph for the past year that he posted, he already does pretty clear periodizations divided by competitions. These periods are 3-4 weeks long which include tapering and post-race stuff. The longest continuous training block was the 2-month marathon build. To me, just looking at the graph suggests that he currently withdraws more from the training account than he puts in. If anyone trains with a slow-building method like NSA, long continuous time to build the fitness would be important, wouldn't it?

Compare that with Andreas Almgren for example, who has much larger gaps between competitions, with very few HM races and no Marathons.

He is doing periods of deloading as he tapers and recovers for his races.
I’m proposing the opposite, 3-4 weeks of overloading to try to create some super compensation and then going back into normal NSM training. So you never reduce load, even in the “recovery” phase.

I’m not sure if it would work, it might be too much and you could just put yourself in a hole because vanilla NSM might not allow you to recover enough. I do these small special blocks before races but there is a couple of down weeks after for the taper and race recovery. Never tried it as a normal training block without the taper, race then recovery but I think it could work as long as you don’t push too hard in the special block.