Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

I didn't know Daniels prescribed 3 LT sessions per week. You also forgot his R pace.

Try harder.

I don't think anyone here is disputing that the shorter rep (3 min and/or 1km more) pace is fundamentally different than Daniels T pace. No bubble burst there. In fact, I think original discussions mention using Daniels VDOT calculator to find that very pace.

What's done the other 6 days a week (and the weeks within a month/year) does begin to diverge from what Daniels prescribes.

The reps are different paces, based on the length. Anything from 90 seconds (much faster than Daniels pace) right up to 10 min reps, obviously much slower than Daniels T Pace.

I mean, imagine trying to run the 10 min reps at Daniel's threshold pace, 3 times a week? You would be in a world of trouble in a fortnight as a best guess.

The whole idea was to find pace in that represent the best chance of staying sub threshold, but because you are only running once a day, ride a fine like looking up to, but never crossing the limit. The rationale and process went through is described in pretty good detail in the book.

The wizard also made a very similar mistake, not understanding that you could run faster than Daniels threshold pace marker, assuming the reps are 3 mins or less, and still not cross the bodies system into threshold.

I mean because the paces are in and around the same ball park, doesn't really say much? I'm not sure I get the point.

What Daniels prescribes seemed to work from a decent amount of people, NSM seems to also work for a lot of people, but apart from the fact they are both running, the philosophies couldn't be much further apart.

Of course there is other training that's existed before. There's nothing training that will exist in the future. But this really does seem to have hit the nail on the head for so many people. I agree with what others often say, it's really nothing to do with what pace to run. It's more understanding how to control your training sensibly, make it manageable and think ahead more than 12-16 weeks. That makes it quite a bit different from most other plans you can pick up.

I broke 15 recently . I posted on about page 570. Come back and we are 35 pages on lol it was only a month ago.

Anyway I do get this point, but I'm also not doing anything sharpening or specific work again I ran sub 15 at Battersea in the same event sirpoc ran 15:02, I hadn't done anything but vanilla NSM.

I think I got greedy, I tried to sharpen for another event recently over a few weeks. Ok, i ran at Battersea last weekend again and took another 3 seconds off my pb. But, who is to say I wouldn't have done that anyway?

I took a more textbook sharpening build to a 5k added in the usual speed stuff. 3 seconds is great but now over a week on, I can feel that my fitness has declined. So that was the peak, classic boom and bust you could say.

If I ran a 5k next week, I'm almost certainly going to be slower than when I first went sub 15. So now I need to build up again. The thing is, if I had just carried on building fitness, there is a good chance I might have taken that 3 seconds anyway? You can't say either way, but now I'm in a situation where the lack of stacking the work has meant I need to build again. This whilst not dramatic, is the whole reason i think it's best just to just keep doing this, until you hit that ceiling or point of diminished returns the book speaks about. No harm done, but at hobby level this is just a small, but classic boom and bust cycle.

Fat Jan logging into as many devices he can't for the classic 4-5 upvotes to try discredit NSM. The runnersareclueless playbook. Respect the hustle.

NSM is basically Daniels. This thread has made some wild claims but this might be the wildest. I thought the stupidest comparison was EIM, but this is even more extreme.

They both train you in running. That's about when the similarities end. They are also both great books (sirpoc himself holds the Daniel's book to a very high standard, btw). But they couldn't be much further apart.

This is a very good post. Congrats on the new pb by the way. I enjoyed the posts your shared before.

16:57 for 3 miles today. Ended off week 6 of using singles to rebuild after a cycle of injuries and sickness. This was my "check in" race. About everything went wrong: forgot watch at home, took a wrong turn or two, etc. But I felt aerobically strong.

I haven't run more than 35 miles/week in the last 6 weeks. But my hours/week has been healthily at 5ish. I'm in school full time with multiple jobs and this has gotten me fitter. It's sustainable and it works. Never did I think I could be in this shape off such low "mileage".

Very near my PR of 17:21 from college on the track in spikes. This was in Feidian Elite 5s (Chinese!) and on the roads with way too many sharp turns. I'm happy, to say the least. And oh yeah, my easy runs are still slower than 10:00/mi.

Add me to the anecdotal conglomerate of folks it has worked for :D

Vanilla NSM means doing 90 minutes of sub-threshold per week.

Has anyone tried higher frequency "micro-dosing" approach? For example doing 15 minutes daily or 17 minutes 6 times a week? The idea would be to do a bit more quality work weekly while making every individual session significantly easier on the body.

I reviewed usual arguments against this approach but I don't find them very convincing. Fat oxidation argument (that injecting some threshold into an endurance run "poisons" fat metabolism so it's important to have pure endurance sessions) is pretty much debunked by recent studies. Nervous system fatigue argument is weak as well (if it was true swimmers would suffer from it but they don't). To me it seems very likely such training would be easier to recover from while providing overall more quality work.

Is there some magic that happens with a longer session that trumps higher overall volume and better recovery of micro-dosing approach? Any thoughts/experience?

if you’re interested, try it. No one has posted doing this. Some people have tried LT1 every day and run into issues but this is a little different.

I believe there’s a reason no successful running programs repeat the same work everyday. Maybe you can prove it’s because we’re all cowards haha

Do you mind if we could get a hint towards your strava, if you have one?

I think you can do the MP or ST blocks in a LR, but go by time, not distance. I think sirpoc had 3x5k or 4x5k sets in his LRs but for slower runners you'd have 3x20 min or 4x20 min, etc. I may be wrong though.

Would you suggest keeping the long runs purely easy or adding MP work?

All of these discussions seem to be a trend of the natural desire to always create something new and try to optimize the last 0.1% out of everything, which most often actually leads to decreases in performance rather than any kind of improvement.

I feel like most people (lets say 5k pb >16 for male) would simply benefit from following the most basic of setups.

If you run 7 days a week: 3 easy runs, 3 sub-t runs, 1 long run (which is just 1.5 times the length of your easy run)
If you run 6 days a week: 2 easy runs, 3 sub-t runs, 1 long run, 1 easy cross-training day
If you run 5 days a week: 2 easy runs, 2 sub-t runs, 1 long run, 2(1) easy cross-training day, (1 sub-t cross training day)
Maybe <5 days a week would still work but then other methods might be better.

If its not deep winter and there are some local races (anything from 1 mile to HM) and you enjoy racing do like 1 race every 6 weeks or so; which replaces the sub-t during that week and turn the long run into an a recovery run (0.5-0.75 times the length of easy run).

From my observations any person who has stuck with one of the approaches outlined above for at least 6 months has made significant improvements.

Once you reach your ceiling on that, and by that I mean no improvements for like 3 months, you can start looking into doing more but before that I would stop stressing about overoptimizing anything. Of course, if one is very interested in hyper-optimization and all that, go and make your best plan. But I believe what I outlined above is enough to reach 99% of the benefits of the original NSM idea, for anyone who just wants to 'test' (test here means sticking with it for at least 6 months) the method.

Really interesting thread. I have been running about 40-45 miles per week and tried implementing double threshold days similar to the Norwegian model. The biggest difference I noticed was in recovery quality - instead of grinding through easy miles feeling flat, I was actually fresh for the hard sessions. For anyone considering this approach, I would suggest starting by replacing one of your weekly easy runs with a proper rest day and adding that quality to an existing workout day. The total training stress stays similar but the polarization is much better.

I did something similar to this, when I did EIM. I totally modified it and I ended up doing 5 workouts a week, around 20-25 mins worth of work a day. Looking back, everything probably ended up 90% of the time between LT1&LT2 although i didn't really know it at the time. I burned out quite fast and I didn't get much past around 6 weeks.

For what it's worth, 2 years later I have been doing vanilla NSM on around the same 6-7 hours a week and I'm significantly faster, after a slow start. But obviously it's hard to compare years apart. The main thing is the basic NSM schedule just feels so repeatable, when I was doing my totally modified system which led on for EIM, I ended up dreading even 20 mins of work a day, especially back to back days. Sometimes you just want the body to have a rest from running hard.

I will caveat with this though. I broke a bone in my foot skiing over the winter and had to cross train. I went back to this, which was lots of sessions and not much easy. When I wasn't running, 20-25 minutes a day felt easy. In fact, sometimes I doubled. Maybe running itself is the problem. If you check out sirpoc last summer when he wasn't running, he seemed to do something similar, and incredible amount more of Lt1+ volume then totally reduced it back to normal in terms of how much he divided up his running when he was able to run again.

NSM Vanilla is not necessary 90 mins of sub-T. It's around 25% sub-T of your weekly duration. In Sirpoc's book, his 8 hours schedule suggestion has 109 minutes of sub-T.

But regarding doing sub-T daily in micro doses, I'm referring once again to Bakken's book. He lists 5 different systems that are activated in "perfect" amounts during (long enough) sub-T sessions. 15-17 minutes will not be enough daily activation to provide enough stimulus for some of these systems.

And then there's the muscle tone part. To me it seems like you misunderstand the purpose of the easy run days in NSM? Muscle tone increases during the night after the session, and is the highest in the morning after the sub-T session. So even if the tone will not go up as much during 15-17 mins as for a longer sub-T session, you'll likely just stack higher and higher tone anyway. Running is a ground-pounding sport, and the muscle limitations behave differently in running than in sports without that ground-pounding. Running is totally dependent on a balanced fascial system, to be able to bounce up and down in a relaxed way many thousand times per session.

gg

It probably comes down to how many races you actually want to race or can race. If you've got lots of races in your area and can jump into one whenever you feel like it, your approach probably works better. Where I live, races are a little more sparse and usually sell out months in advance since everyone started running during lockdowns -- so working towards a specific race makes a bit more sense to me.

And, again, I'm not talking about a huge boom/bust cycle, just a small extra amount of race pace. Maybe replace the 10x3 with a fast 30x45 and a 6x1000k four and two weeks before a 5k, shorten the long run a bit if necessary. Or do two 5x5/5 at HM/HM+30 workouts before a half, just to get used to running continously again.