Minimal improvement despite training harder, more mileage and better workouts.

Do less mileage and easier workouts, see if that fixes things.

This is an interesting conundrum. In order to begin to address any issues, you need to have data. Have you been tracking your HR, along with times, in all of your workouts. And how is your diet, and recovery (sleep, etc.)?

If you are constantly feeling tired, especially after sessions then you are probably doing too much. Your body doesn't adapt as well when it's constantly burnt down, if you feel good after workouts and generally after easy runs then you will probably be improving quicker.

So yeah, slower tempo and thresholds, slower easy/long runs might do the trick.

Sometimes breakthroughs happen after long blocks of consistency. If you are training at the right effort and recovering well, just be patient.

“might”, “might”, “might”, bah.

You see, if he actually had hard data, there migh be less guessing going on.

More details? How much more volume we talking? How much harder are the workouts? Eventually your rate of improvement will slow done and those big jumps will become small ones. Periodization becomes more important the more advanced you get as well. By barely PRing are you ahead of your times from last year at the same point in the season?

without times and stuff this doesn't say much. you real fast but plateaued. or slow and hardworking but figuring out you're not very fast? different courses different horses.

long slow distance might be ok for 5ks or college distances but at the mile what's happening is you take the 50+ kids who show up for an area XC championship and funnel that down to the fastest kids. finishing 20th at solid clip is no longer valuable. you can either get on your horse and stay with a flying pack and get me top 8 points or not.

folks knock sprinty-sounding workouts but it's the guys who can run 50s for open 4s and splits around 60-65 who compete better. i don't see the value of running 50 miles a week to run 1 good mile on the weekend. in a track context it's speed of splits. it's kick at the end.

anyhow, point is answer is different for someone 4:15 or 5.

If you really want any kind of help here you need to go into a LOT more detail about what you're doing than you're describing here, which really is almost nothing. But I will tell you this. It's rarely a good idea to increase more than one element of training at a time. You're adding two, more volume and harder running. It's probably too much of an increased workload and you aren't recovering enough. Do one or the other but not both at the same time.

His other option is to run even longer, and do even harder workouts!

I’m gonna paraphrase from one of my fav books

stagnation isn’t a flat line, it’s like when you cook a spring. It stays in the same spot but it builds up energy. You can only build up so much energy before you explode up to new heights.

wishing the best

Except continuing to train harder than the rate of adaptation can sometimes make the spring go flat, or even break.

Give me how many sessions you run per week and normal weekly mileage and examples of some workouts you have done and PR:s so far and I will tell you what you have to do to fast improve. 🇸🇪🧙🏼‍♂️🇸🇪

Go away, scammer.

It comes down to talent. You probably had a quick improvement when you started doing all the common training modalities.

I would suggest 3-4 days off, then do some easy jogging.

Maybe your nutrition or sleep are not on point?

Its technically not possible for your trainings to become harder and for your performance to remain the same, because, to do the harder training, you would need to have higher performance.

So try and get nice sleep, eat healthy food consisting of carbs and proteins, also healthy fats for immune system and hormone production.

What's your ferritin level?

What? You really think no one ever levels off? I'm not saying the OP is at the best he'll be, but there are genetic limitations that no matter how many miles you run or workouts you do, or rest you get or nutrition, will mean no improvement.

As an example, do you think no one ever trains harder after a lifetime PR than before?

I do think that people level off but I don't think your training can become harder and longer withour your performance increasing.

Either OP just thinks his trainings got harder and longer or he did not check his performance gains properly.

For example lets say my training is a 10 mile long run which I finish in 90 minutes. (I'm a hobby jogger)

If I start finishing that run in 89 minutes, then 88 minutes, than 87 minutes, my performance must increase.

The thing is I cannot make myself to drop the time of my long run, so I can say that I have leveled off.

Most people cannot break a certain barrier. For someone like me its 10 miles in 90 minutes barrier, for someone like Kipchoge its 10 miles in 45 minutes barrier.

Last time I got it checked, it was 67 ng/mL

This was in September of 2023

doctor said it was within the normal range