What running-related hill are you willing to die on?

Why not? Because you are picking one tiny aspect of his training and using it as justification for adopting it into your own entirely different training plan.
Cheptegei runs 20x400m workouts with the last 10 in 57s. Should I do that as well? Maybe I can tempo 4:15 mile pace while I’m at it- he does, so why not?

My hill to die on is that too many people use the phrase “Easy days easy, hard days hard” and then only do the easy part. Easy days don’t have to be so damn easy when you aren’t doing hard days. Doing base mileage at recovery pace makes no sense if you aren’t recovering from anything.

If I don't get 3000km out of a pair of shoes I don't think I'm getting my money's worth. I have a pair with over 4000km on, and they're still OK, though probably not for too much longer.

What is it about your shoes that makes them unwearable after about 250 miles? Is it the cushioning? Because shoes all start out with different amounts anyway, so a shoe can lose a lot and still be more cushioned than others when new.

Do you work for a shoe company?

Your insecurities are showing and therefore, proving my point.

Thanks!

It is not shoes, it is not the program, it is not the strange movement in warm up or gym, it is not the coach, sometimes it is just pure luck:

- Runner does not get injured, runners finds the right coach whose training works on his/her abilities etc....

for any runners who have no chance at making money off of running, doing the main portion of training is good enough and that doing every little thing to squeeze every last drip of performance out of your body is simply not worth it. i believe that 40-65mpw is good enough to be competitive. this includes recovery runs, long runs, threshold runs, speed runs, and rest. drills before hard sessions and 2 minutes of stretching after your run are ideal as well. however, everything beyond this is simply not worth your time for the marginal benefits it may provide you. i've seen people do 1 hour drill sessions, afternoon yoga, ice baths, massages, doubles, powerlifting, morning shake out run, etc. while these things will improve your performance, they are simply not worth doing if you have school/job as well as friends, families, and hobbies. if you can run a 4:15 mile, great. but do you really want to double the time investment you put into running to hit that 3:59 at the cost of time spent on other things? it is up to you, but i would say "no".

Easy runs are the most important workouts ever, unless you're running less than 5 days per week.
Easy (runs)is a feel, not pace/HR. If it feels easy and relaxed, you're doing it right. You don't have to force the pace or slow down just to hit certain HR%/pace.

Strides are a small but important piece of the puzzle like scales in piano. Don't try to run them as fast as you can. You should run them fast, but relaxed and even kinda effortless, with the latter being more important. Fast is also relative, so don't force yourself to run them at certain pace. As long as they feel fast but relaxed, you're doing them right.

Running forms and footstrikes don't matter as long as you don't overstride or aren't a blatant "stomper", with the caveat that if you're injured, run through it, and develop some kind of compensatory patterns or gait, muscular imbalances, you may want to work on your form through strength training as well as gait retraining. Otherwise "correcting" your running form rarely has any benefits.

Many people run tempo/intervals too hard.

All runners should do strength training, especially hip strengthening exercises from an injury prevention standpoint.

Gallowalking Mf's

not training but running-related. This should be where I get a lot of downvotes lol

Mo Farah was a better racer on the track than Bekele.

Mo didn't compete in a noticeably weaker era than any other all-time greats.

what set Bekele apart and made him the GOAT was his XC's accomplishments.

Jakob will go down as the GOAT 5k runner.

Jakob's WRs are impressive so far, particularly the 7:17, but whether they hold up well remains to be seen. We don't know how much that's due to the advent of wavelight and superspikes. It's possible someone may come along and break them in few years like what Kiptum did to the marathon.

If Jakob wants to win another championship 1500m, he should cut the frontrunning BS. It just doesn't work.

I was with you until your example of going from 4:15 to 3:59. If could guarantee a 3:59, I’d do every little thing I could. My mile pr is 4:12.

A lot of marathon training plans would be well served by swapping a couple of those long race pace sessions with 5-10k races. The former have obvious utility, but I think they're relied upon too heavily as a confidence booster and/or predictor of performance and a lot of amateurs lack the aerobic base and recovery capacity to absorb that combination of volume and intensity every other week. Often translates to people either pushing individual workouts too far because they think it correlates to a faster race time, or gradually overcooking themselves because they never really bounce back. Tuneup races build in a couple of weeks to freshen up so you're not constantly running such a fine line, are a more reliable assessment of your actual ability, and keep you in touch with harder efforts more effectively than the typical half-assed marathon block "speed sessions" that you're too fatigued to run well.

Also, those painfully slow 30 mile "fasted long runs" are dumb.

Nah. If you have the time and passion there is no reason to work less hard. The little things do add up and going from 4:15 to sub 4 would be a dream for 99 percent of runners!

Race walking is goofy as flip

Anything but Nike.

The word athletics.

The earliest work that defines our sport was written by twenty-three-year-old H.F. Wilkinson who differentiates between "athletic sports" and "boyish sports, such as ball playing."

Wilkinson, Henry Fazakerley. Modern Athletics. Frederick Warne & Co. London, 1868.

Americans misunderstand and misuse the term "athletics." Since the 1905 formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) forerunner of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) educational groups and institutions bond together and oversee many sports. Athletics, the sport Americans call Track and Field, have athletes as its participants. In the sport of swimming, competitors are swimmers. Gridiron football, baseball, and basketball are games contested by ball players. Golfers play golf. Collectively, all are sportsmen or sportswomen. John Kruk, a former professional baseball player, recognized this fact in the title of his autobiography "I Ain't an Athlete, Lady...".

This misconception leads to additional confusion regarding terminology of runner. Running is not a sport; it is bipedal locomotion used in a variety of sports including athletics. Running for fitness and recreation is for people engaged in the activity while in motion on roads, trails, and treadmills. These people are runners and typically live a running lifestyle. Other lifestyle activities are enjoyed by climbers, surfers, racing car drivers, and other people with many more physical interests who should be considered an enthusiast or sportsperson but not an athlete. Adding to the confusion is the fact that people who swim as a fitness activity and not sport are still labeled swimmers.

Kruk, John, and Paul Hagen. "I Ain't an Athlete, Lady...": My Well-Rounded Life and Times. Simon & Schuster, 1994.

You don't need to feel great on race day

Yes, and I would add, the best training method is the one that brings the best out of a specific athlete. It's not going to be the same for each athlete even if they are competing in the same event. Jingy is a strength/fitness monster who thrives on the dialed-in speed pace as a "normal" race pace, but others benefit more from intense intervals and speed workouts.

If you can determine what works best for *your own* body/mind, then you are at least 90% going in the right direction.

And I will add that Tadej Pogacar, who just completed the best single pro cycling season in 40 years and may be the GOAT even at 25, is very much like Jingy in that he has been training his way consistently for years, and is an aerobic/cardio monster who can turn on the speed/watts at will in long races. Pagacar just rides away from the other elite cyclists far before the finish and just rolls along to the finish. Strength plus accessible speed, plus knowing his HR zones/watts intimately (as should most elite athletes). Pagacar is riding like Kipchoge at his peak.

I'll ignore the OP's figure of speech just to show a glorious hill in San Diego where decades ago my training buddies and I used to run hill repeats about once each week for a portion of the year. I'm in NYC these days and haven't been to San Diego since 1996. Now in my sixties, I no longer run though I stay fit in other ways. The hill at Kate Sessions Memorial Park was a great part of our training. We would typically do 5 sets of 2 hard to very hard efforts up the steep slope (roughly 180-200m, 30 something to 40 seconds, running south to north from near the intersection of Soledad Road and Loring Street up toward the flagpole in the parking oval) with a walk-jog down after the first rep in each set. I would get my pulse to 180-190 bpm on the uphills. Between sets we would do three strides along the plateau running roughly east-west and west-east. By the end of the third set legs would be trembling. The views were fantastic over the Pacific Ocean, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, San Diego and down to Mexico. That was a hill to die on. Sometimes after the hills I would go for a barefoot cool-down along Pacific Beach. The simple things in life are some of the most beautiful.

google.com

Kate Sessions Memorial Park · 5115 Soledad Rd, San Diego, CA 92109

★★★★★ · Park

Open link

I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but the most neglected piece of the training puzzle is hill repeats. 45-90 seconds at a good clip, lots of rest.

Everyone should do them, especially those focusing on 10k and under.