Mistake #1: Running Too Fast On Easy Days

Coe Fan 4 wrote:

For most people fine, but you can't take easy days for optimal fitness at an elite level. Nearly every top elite has to do threshold quality runs day in and out to maintain race pace fitness for most of the year, especially these days. There is such a thing as junk miles, and individuals who ascribe to them hardly ever get past mediocrity, except in rare cases.

Examples; Coe ran every day hard, Maree trained at 4:30 mile pace and never ran slower, Bekele and Geb never ran slower than 5:10 pace on their longest runs, Viren never ran slowly even in base phase, Farah never took easy days, Jonesy was out the door on long runs at 5 minute pace, Mantz never runs slow, Radcliffe didn't take easy days, Dibaba and Defar never trained slowly, El G never ran slower than what equates to 4:50 mile pace, all the current young guns run thresholds and never train slowly. You can check literally tons of workout data.

The one major exception was Steve Cram did write in his book that all season long on Sundays he would jog about 10 minute mile pace for as long as 30 miles. He believed this Lydiardesque recovery run developed his aerobic and capillary system. Lydiard's guys themselves hardly ever ran easy days, even on long runs the pace was steady. Only in the first 2 weeks of base phase did they jog 20 miles once per week to safely adjust to the volume. The runs after the first two weeks were either medium or hard. Email any great runner. Ask Ritz or Meb if they ever ran slowly on purpose or if they believe that junk miles have any real benefit. Peace.

Coe Fan 4 wrote:

For most people fine, but you can't take easy days for optimal fitness at an elite level. Nearly every top elite has to do threshold quality runs day in and out to maintain race pace fitness for most of the year, especially these days. There is such a thing as junk miles, and individuals who ascribe to them hardly ever get past mediocrity, except in rare cases.

Examples; Coe ran every day hard, Maree trained at 4:30 mile pace and never ran slower, Bekele and Geb never ran slower than 5:10 pace on their longest runs, Viren never ran slowly even in base phase, Farah never took easy days, Jonesy was out the door on long runs at 5 minute pace, Mantz never runs slow, Radcliffe didn't take easy days, Dibaba and Defar never trained slowly, El G never ran slower than what equates to 4:50 mile pace, all the current young guns run thresholds and never train slowly. You can check literally tons of workout data.

The one major exception was Steve Cram did write in his book that all season long on Sundays he would jog about 10 minute mile pace for as long as 30 miles. He believed this Lydiardesque recovery run developed his aerobic and capillary system. Lydiard's guys themselves hardly ever ran easy days, even on long runs the pace was steady. Only in the first 2 weeks of base phase did they jog 20 miles once per week to safely adjust to the volume. The runs after the first two weeks were either medium or hard. Email any great runner. Ask Ritz or Meb if they ever ran slowly on purpose or if they believe that junk miles have any real benefit. Peace.

Usaer wrote:

Coe Fan 4 wrote:

For most people fine, but you can't take easy days for optimal fitness at an elite level. Nearly every top elite has to do threshold quality runs day in and out to maintain race pace fitness for most of the year, especially these days. There is such a thing as junk miles, and individuals who ascribe to them hardly ever get past mediocrity, except in rare cases.

Examples; Coe ran every day hard, Maree trained at 4:30 mile pace and never ran slower, Bekele and Geb never ran slower than 5:10 pace on their longest runs, Viren never ran slowly even in base phase, Farah never took easy days, Jonesy was out the door on long runs at 5 minute pace, Mantz never runs slow, Radcliffe didn't take easy days, Dibaba and Defar never trained slowly, El G never ran slower than what equates to 4:50 mile pace, all the current young guns run thresholds and never train slowly. You can check literally tons of workout data.

The one major exception was Steve Cram did write in his book that all season long on Sundays he would jog about 10 minute mile pace for as long as 30 miles. He believed this Lydiardesque recovery run developed his aerobic and capillary system. Lydiard's guys themselves hardly ever ran easy days, even on long runs the pace was steady. Only in the first 2 weeks of base phase did they jog 20 miles once per week to safely adjust to the volume. The runs after the first two weeks were either medium or hard. Email any great runner. Ask Ritz or Meb if they ever ran slowly on purpose or if they believe that junk miles have any real benefit. Peace.

^
^
this.

the body acclimatizes.

Just Another Hobby Jogger wrote:

A. Coach wrote:

I looked back quickly and couldn’t find the reference to 4 hour marathons, but it’s worth noting that marathon pace has completely different meanings for fast runners and slower runners. Most marathoners run their race at the same pace as their easy runs or slower. I’d guess marathon pace pretty quickly converges with easy pace after 3 hours or so then gets significantly slower than easy pace as you get much over 4.

Here is the post I was referring to.l

"I see 4 hour marathoners running there easy runs at 180bpm plus. They are exhausted at the end of a supposedly easy run. They probably need to be running way slower than 11 min/mile."

Of course, those 4 hour marathoner should not be running their easy days at or faster than their marathon pace. But why does that lead to the conclusion that they need to be running "way slower than 11min/mile"? Maybe some do. Maybe 11min/mile is about right for some others.

Coe Fan 4 wrote:

For most people fine, but you can't take easy days for optimal fitness at an elite level. Nearly every top elite has to do threshold quality runs day in and out to maintain race pace fitness for most of the year, especially these days. There is such a thing as junk miles, and individuals who ascribe to them hardly ever get past mediocrity, except in rare cases.

Examples; Coe ran every day hard, Maree trained at 4:30 mile pace and never ran slower, Bekele and Geb never ran slower than 5:10 pace on their longest runs, Viren never ran slowly even in base phase, Farah never took easy days, Jonesy was out the door on long runs at 5 minute pace, Mantz never runs slow, Radcliffe didn't take easy days, Dibaba and Defar never trained slowly, El G never ran slower than what equates to 4:50 mile pace, all the current young guns run thresholds and never train slowly. You can check literally tons of workout data.

The one major exception was Steve Cram did write in his book that all season long on Sundays he would jog about 10 minute mile pace for as long as 30 miles. He believed this Lydiardesque recovery run developed his aerobic and capillary system. Lydiard's guys themselves hardly ever ran easy days, even on long runs the pace was steady. Only in the first 2 weeks of base phase did they jog 20 miles once per week to safely adjust to the volume. The runs after the first two weeks were either medium or hard. Email any great runner. Ask Ritz or Meb if they ever ran slowly on purpose or if they believe that junk miles have any real benefit. Peace.

P Luttrell wrote:

Coe Fan 4 wrote:

For most people fine, but you can't take easy days for optimal fitness at an elite level. Nearly every top elite has to do threshold quality runs day in and out to maintain race pace fitness for most of the year, especially these days. There is such a thing as junk miles, and individuals who ascribe to them hardly ever get past mediocrity, except in rare cases.

Examples; Coe ran every day hard, Maree trained at 4:30 mile pace and never ran slower, Bekele and Geb never ran slower than 5:10 pace on their longest runs, Viren never ran slowly even in base phase, Farah never took easy days, Jonesy was out the door on long runs at 5 minute pace, Mantz never runs slow, Radcliffe didn't take easy days, Dibaba and Defar never trained slowly, El G never ran slower than what equates to 4:50 mile pace, all the current young guns run thresholds and never train slowly. You can check literally tons of workout data.

The one major exception was Steve Cram did write in his book that all season long on Sundays he would jog about 10 minute mile pace for as long as 30 miles. He believed this Lydiardesque recovery run developed his aerobic and capillary system. Lydiard's guys themselves hardly ever ran easy days, even on long runs the pace was steady. Only in the first 2 weeks of base phase did they jog 20 miles once per week to safely adjust to the volume. The runs after the first two weeks were either medium or hard. Email any great runner. Ask Ritz or Meb if they ever ran slowly on purpose or if they believe that junk miles have any real benefit. Peace.

At the risk of sounding snarky, I'll say this:

This is a very long comment for someone who obviously didn't read the article.

If you did, you'd quickly find that I wasn't arguing that all runs should be "easy", but rather, the runs in between workout days should be. More specifically, we should emulate the relative intensity of elite runners on these days, which was between 63-70% of 10k pace, based on a random sample of 24 elites.

Also, I'm not sure why you would say something that is so demonstrably false. Conner Mantz does in fact run quite slowly on his easy runs (relative to his race paces). He has a public Strava account and you can check it for yourself. He tends to do most of his easy runs between 6:30-7:10/mile.

And in regards to the other athletes you've mentioned - as I've said at least 3 times in this thread - unless we have access to the actual training logs of athletes, we can't know for sure that their accounts of what they did are wholly accurate. Seb Coe, for example, has at least 3 different versions of how much mileage he did, and how hard he did it. Memory tends to be quite selective, and therefore, people have a tendency to recall the hardest and fastest, and forget the ordinary, mundane easy miles.

However, in the article, I'm basing my prescription off actual documented training that's publicly available on Strava.

800 dude wrote:

P Luttrell wrote:

If we remove the arbitrary classifications of "elite runner" and "recreational runner", I have produced data on 24 human beings - who have the same flesh and blood as any other human being - for whom running "easy paces" at around 63-70% of 10k pace has worked fairly well for them, insofar as they all produced performances that placed them in the top 10 continental lists in their event for 2024.

The insistence that this wouldn't work for other people (who may be a little slower), just seems like cognitive dissonance to me.

We aren't quibbling about the fuzzy edges of various artificially constructed categories. You admit right here that your data is about some of the most extreme outliers among the human species. The insistence that the median athlete should train in the same way as some of the best athletes who have ever lived--after they have reached the peak of their powers, no less--is a textbook example of the survivorship fallacy.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that what elites do is irrelevant, nor am I suggesting that experimentation based on their practices is unwarranted. You may ultimately be right. But "elites do it so we should all do it" isn't sound logic.