I’ve read in some if the archived threads that Henry Rono would hammer solid workouts almost every other day and race frequently, but BEFORE he did this, he would spend 4 months simply running: 15km in the AM, 15km in the PM. Every day. And he ran quite slowly on these runs.
Conventional wisdom tells me that running a ton of miles really slowly for 4 months will make me a “long slow runner”. If one were to do this (not the exact 15k/15k, but similar) I know you’d need to keep in strides and maybe unstructured / unplanned tempos, but what else would one need in order to keep this long base productive? Would elements of training need to progress throughout this period? Or could they stay fairly constant?