Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

A coach who does not use NSM talked about training, but did not mention NSM. How is this possible???

As soon as I watched the Magness video I knew there would be comments here.

His videos are aimed at a totally different audience to NSM.

People need to remember that NSM has been very successful for many of us "Hobby Joggers" but Magness is talking to mostly college kids and track specialists and, in his mind, NSM is not the best fit for this demographic.

You can tell he thinks his “base” is kids track rather than I expect the majority that watch are veteran road runners.

interesting but very little new but he does get very excitable, I wish many coaches I had were like that though, than he does mention bakken book, hope the English version is out soon.

And how long do you want your long run to be? 3 hours or 2:45 would be fine.

How long is your long run now? What benefit do you think you gain from a 3:15/3:30 long run?

I look back on my running history and I honestly think one of the best prepared marathons I had was my 3:29 with the Hanson Method and I believe my longest run was 2:30 and 27k (although a faster pace than NSM admittedly)

Magness isn't going to get burned twice. The comments were a car crash last time.

He had a very poor understanding of NSM previously, although made some good points past all the bluster.

Magness lives in a bit of an echo chamber vacuum these days and certainly wasn't used to anyone challenging his ideas or thinking alternatively, or even considering he might be wrong on a few points.

I do think he would have added something to the conversation, but handled the whole thing very badly here. The biggest red flag for me was in one of the comments he still would add and prescribe intensity for someone on NSM, but who is still making progress on the basics.

The flip side is both him and sirpoc and Bakken are in the same page, in that if spamming NSM stops working that's when it's worth doing some of the things he suggests. But I couldn't understand him wanting to rock the boat when you are in the stage of linear progression "just" subthreshold brings. To me that was just him trying to defend his own held position, rather than get involved in something different and new that has helped at this point, well into the thousands if not tens of thousands of runners I would imagine.

I doubt that the majority who watch his videos are kids etc. Most of the comments on his videos are from veterans. Same on his FB group.

Kids are unlikely to have peaked, and are still in the growth phase. NSM definitely has a place, but it may not fit their timetables. I wish I had been more educated on the NSM thinking when I was a youngster.

At....<70% MHR.

I'm old now, 70, and doing 18 milers at like 9:45 pace. So just under 3 hours.
My best marathons, in my 50s, were 2:52-57 and the prep always included multiple long runs like 22 in 2:40. As I age it takes longer and longer. The idea of jogging them is new and very different.

20 years of 20 milers. I wouldn’t change a thing since it’s clearly working for you. You likely have more longevity than 99.5% of people who have posted here.
This program is about repeatability and being in your 70s and running that distance, well you’ve got it figured out already, lol.

I somehow don't think that Magness is aware of this ... I dunno

His main argument against NSM was that it's going to hurt your 800m race results

If not high school kids then I have no idea, who he thinks his audience is ???

It WAS working until a succession of injuries threw me off track. High hammie, low hammie, calf . . . 8-10 weeks "off" each time (xtraining). What intrigues me most about NSM is reducing injury risk.

I promise this isn’t a troll post. I’ve been doing this training more or less for two years, and pretty strictly over the past 12 months. I tried to follow sirpoc’s London build as closely as possible, probably ~95% of the same runs, just swapping a couple days near the end. The marathon went really well. I PR’ed by 15 minutes and ran 3:15. But my other times have more or less stayed the same - 19 min 5K and 1:30 min half, which I’ve run 3 times with this, and like 5 times total.
I’m discouraged because I stopped going to my run club to focus on ST work and slowed down my easy runs to 10-11 min per mile. Meanwhile I see so many people with fantastic results. I feel like I’m a rare non responder or low responder that the book kinda talks about.

The two things I can think of:
- Down periods / inconsistency. I’ve had to take a couple days off here and there over, sometimes a week due to illness. Is everyone else just really being consistent and running through illnesses?
- Training load is too low. Even during the marathon build, my total load was never as high as with previous plans. Those plans did have much faster easier runs (closer to 8:30-9) which probably inflated the numbers, but I still seem to make slower fitness gains (based on intervals.icu).
Right now I’m running roughly 7 hours per week or 45 miles. I’ve peaked closer to 70 in previous plans.

Any thoughts? I truly believe this works, and really want it to work for me. My tentative plan is to just start gradually adding more and more TL, slowly increasing duration until I top out at 9 hours (hopefully closer to 65 miles per week) and adding cycling/stairmaster doubles.
I genuinely appreciate any feedback here! Sorry if the formatting is weird, sending this from my phone

I’m here after watching Magness’ NSM video. I know people were VERY upset by it, but honestly I thought it was pretty positive and got me interested in this thread.

I’ve been dealing with some very persistent calf injuries for the past two years and despite loads of PT, I can’t seem to get above 25-30 mpw. The purported low injury risk of this method caught my attention. I probably have been following more of a Daniels approach of 1-2 pretty hard VO2 max style workouts + a decently uptempo long run.

I’m going to try doing 1 running Sub-T workout + 1-2 cycling threshold workouts a week to see if I can see if i can get my aerobic engine high enough to break 80 in the half this May.

About the 70% rule. Yeah, its good, but you need to know your max heartrate. My brother said he was sure his maximum heartrate was 180. Got him on a HR chest belt and paced him for a 5k. His max HR reached 197 (I almost killed him).

I see a lot of fast runners who runs their easy jogs too slow. I guess, at least for some part, has to do with wrong calculated max heartrate. I saw som guy running 5k in 17 min and did his easy jogs at 7:00 min/km.
Many people write posts like "there is no such thing as an too easy pace"....but ofc there is. Otherwise, why even bother with volume?

Well, 7 min/km for a 17 min 5k runner, would fit in at the lower end of easy pace, per the recommendations coming from the analysis done by Paul Lutterall.

Ultimately, if you training load is less than other plans, you probably won't improve. You might get close, as this probably minimises fatigue, so you are absorbing and being able to make use of the accumulation of load more.

The whole idea at its core is this allows you to do more over X amount of time, not less. Which is where the vast majority of people's improvement comes from. It's cleverly designed to keep you on the straight mad narrow, but that's the heart of it. I'm not even talking CTL. Sirpoc mentions this in the book, but just in pure terms, overall you are just running more, more consistently. Simply, if you are running less, making dramatic improvement is going to be unrealistic.

The majority of almost unbelievable progress from seasoned runners, are guys going from inconsistent 5 hour weeks to 6-7 hours consistently being a breeze. There have been a few people who have had to cut their hours down from 10+ I have seen, to a more manageable 7 and still just about held form. But there is always going to be a cut off point with running where less is less, even on a purely basic level.

Probably not the answer you are looking for. But, the good news is if you have previously been able to sustain higher loads and not get injured like most of us, then plenty of that more aggressive plans will work for you. Personally, if I could handle it I like the look of Pitfz high end plans. But, the chance of survival for old hobby joggers is less than a coin toss.

What's stopping you from either increasing your ST intervals pace or easy run pace to increase the total load? The point is to increase pace as you get fitter.

Thanks for that, that’s a good gut check. I do like this training! But I think the trouble I’m getting into is how often people say to start conservative in paces and also how long sirpoc took to go from 6 to 8 hours. We’re all coming from different starting points and react differently to load, so seems like this is a tweak I need to make at this point.

To the other poster, I have increased paces, but was cautious with it. For the 6 min reps, roughly from 7:00 pace to 6:45 over the past 6-9 months. So load has been increasing in that regard. But still running similar race times