Sub 4 in my 30s? Train me.

John Whelan wrote:

I'm doing a similar return to serious running -same mile PR, slightly faster PRs at longer distances, slightly younger (28), and less removed from serious training (~5-year period of no consistent high volume). It's been tough thus far.

Given the available context of your situation, sub-4:00 seems delusional to me, but a goal can be delusional and still be a good goal depending on your mindset and life circumstances. It can be good to have a crazy thing that gets us excited and out the door every day, and with the right mindset will be a fantastic project even if the odds of achieving the crazy thing are quite low. It's bad if we over-invest our time and energy into the crazy thing at the expense of other aspects of our lives.

Some important questions:

• Were there some tangible aspects of training/performance that you truly left on the table in college? Do you have a clear way to improve on these aspects moving forward?
• Do you have a clear idea of what training strategies work for your particular talents? You're at an age where there isn't any time for failed experiments before you age to far beyond your prime.
• Do you have (or can create for yourself) a sufficiently training-friendly lifestyle to properly execute and adapt to the level of training you would need to do?
• Do you have a lot of disposable income for gear, treatment, races, etc?
• Can you eat and sleep like a professional athlete? (and actually enjoy that life)

Some of my recent experiences/random thoughts:

• It's easy to get back to solid casual training, but absurdly difficult to get back to REAL high-level training. It took me over a year before I was durable enough to stack good training weeks without always dealing with some sort of small injury.
• It's a lot of fun to write my own training and approach a long-term plan, but also tough to balance both the patience and strong self-belief required. Feels weird to believe that I can be better than I ever was when I just ran a 5000m time where I'd get lapped by the college version of myself.
• Getting frequency of training was key for me -things finally started to click when I scaled back to smaller runs and workouts than I would normally do and added a lot of cross-training doubles.
• The new shoe tech is beyond awesome, nothing much more to say about that.
• Like you, I kept a decent level of speed, but my body's ability to do and recover from the high-intensity training to improve or extend that top-end speed is much poorer than it was when I was 16-22.
• The way training fits into life is fundamentally different now. Even without a family or a demanding job, it's just consistently less convenient to find space for running compared to my college days.
• In college, I didn't understand how much of what I thought was all my own internal motivation was outsourced to my teammates.

Training-wise, if I was in your shoes right I'd first focus mostly on pure speed stuff and pure aerobic stuff, including a lot of cross-training. At your age, speed is going to get harder to earn every year and it's much easier to maintain it than to gain it. Aerobically you are way behind on development and volume, but with cross-training you can accelerate that somewhat while mitigating risk. Outside of the sprint work, I'd keep most of the running fairly easy at first, maybe some occasional chill threshold intervals but not much/any hard "lactic" stuff.

Once you've established a quality and volume of movement over the ~3-6 months I'd then add in a lot of threshold interval work and medium-length hill repeats (30-90s). Do this for another ~3-6 months and now you're ready to start your first cycle of specific mile training.

similar boat wrote:

John Whelan wrote:

I'm doing a similar return to serious running -same mile PR, slightly faster PRs at longer distances, slightly younger (28), and less removed from serious training (~5-year period of no consistent high volume). It's been tough thus far.

Given the available context of your situation, sub-4:00 seems delusional to me, but a goal can be delusional and still be a good goal depending on your mindset and life circumstances. It can be good to have a crazy thing that gets us excited and out the door every day, and with the right mindset will be a fantastic project even if the odds of achieving the crazy thing are quite low. It's bad if we over-invest our time and energy into the crazy thing at the expense of other aspects of our lives.

Some important questions:

• Were there some tangible aspects of training/performance that you truly left on the table in college? Do you have a clear way to improve on these aspects moving forward?
• Do you have a clear idea of what training strategies work for your particular talents? You're at an age where there isn't any time for failed experiments before you age to far beyond your prime.
• Do you have (or can create for yourself) a sufficiently training-friendly lifestyle to properly execute and adapt to the level of training you would need to do?
• Do you have a lot of disposable income for gear, treatment, races, etc?
• Can you eat and sleep like a professional athlete? (and actually enjoy that life)

Some of my recent experiences/random thoughts:

• It's easy to get back to solid casual training, but absurdly difficult to get back to REAL high-level training. It took me over a year before I was durable enough to stack good training weeks without always dealing with some sort of small injury.
• It's a lot of fun to write my own training and approach a long-term plan, but also tough to balance both the patience and strong self-belief required. Feels weird to believe that I can be better than I ever was when I just ran a 5000m time where I'd get lapped by the college version of myself.
• Getting frequency of training was key for me -things finally started to click when I scaled back to smaller runs and workouts than I would normally do and added a lot of cross-training doubles.
• The new shoe tech is beyond awesome, nothing much more to say about that.
• Like you, I kept a decent level of speed, but my body's ability to do and recover from the high-intensity training to improve or extend that top-end speed is much poorer than it was when I was 16-22.
• The way training fits into life is fundamentally different now. Even without a family or a demanding job, it's just consistently less convenient to find space for running compared to my college days.
• In college, I didn't understand how much of what I thought was all my own internal motivation was outsourced to my teammates.

Training-wise, if I was in your shoes right I'd first focus mostly on pure speed stuff and pure aerobic stuff, including a lot of cross-training. At your age, speed is going to get harder to earn every year and it's much easier to maintain it than to gain it. Aerobically you are way behind on development and volume, but with cross-training you can accelerate that somewhat while mitigating risk. Outside of the sprint work, I'd keep most of the running fairly easy at first, maybe some occasional chill threshold intervals but not much/any hard "lactic" stuff.

Once you've established a quality and volume of movement over the ~3-6 months I'd then add in a lot of threshold interval work and medium-length hill repeats (30-90s). Do this for another ~3-6 months and now you're ready to start your first cycle of specific mile training.

I was in kind of a similar situation to you, and a few things I encountered that I wasn't fully prepared for are:

1) I ran in college in a cold place, but fortunately we had an indoor track to use. I tried using a local college's flat track for a bit and it absolutely wrecked my ankles. I really can not handle doing solid work on a flat track anymore.

2) Okay, maybe you live somewhere where it's not as cold and sh!tty. Do you have reliable access to an outdoor track? The coach at the local university said he doesn't care if I use the outdoor track one bit, but they have a "manager" come and kick people off nonstop, so it's not an option. The local high school locks theirs up almost all the time for no good reason. I had to drive 15 minutes to get to another high school where I could use the track, and only when they weren't having a game at the facilities. Which means early mornings or the rare afternoon in spring when there's no event going on.

3) Meets. In college you might get flown a few states over multiple weekends to race good competition. A 4 hour bus drive to a nearby city and a hotel room is a given for a handful of meets. I really am not in a position to do these things right now, I can't give up a full weekend and all that money to go race, so I've relied on local-ish open meets.

The good parts of training were:

1) As a real adult, I eat better than 20 year old me. I'm actually leaner and stronger and I feel healthier.

2) Again, not a dumb college kid anymore. It's easier, although not a cakewalk, for me to get up early in the cold, get to the gym, bang out a treadmill session, and have a full day after. I'm just a bit more dedicated and willing.

3) Running down a college kid in the homestretch of a meet as an "old man" (I'm really not that old) is something I won't forget anytime soon.

4) If you trust yourself, making your own training or working with friends to make your training is very rewarding. I did the workouts I knew I liked, or liked enough to tolerate. I probably dodged a few things that I should have done more of. It was easier for me to say, "I'm super banged up, I need a day or two off and a day or two of easy jogging to recover," because I wasn't worried about what coach or my teammates might say/think. In college, I would have continued until I was hurt.

TribalWarefare wrote:

Thanks so much for this reply- I think it highlights a lot of really good aspects for me to think about.

A lot of people have pointed out that training post college is very hard to do at the same level once you leave that structure and focus. One thing I do have going for me right now is that I coach high school xc/track and have a few good kids that I can consistently jump in workouts with. Couple of 4:30 milers, one 4:05 kid, and a couple quick 800m kids. I know it’s not the same but it’s a good group especially for bridging that gap back to a basic level of fitness.

A big thing I regret about college training is that I just didn’t string together consistent seasons of training. I had a lot of other hobbies in college so summers were very full and I’d spend weeks backpacking and fishing rather than stacking 80 mile weeks. So a lot of losing fitness over the summer/winter and then slowly getting it back during the season.

I’m also a lot stronger mentally now, I know how to address injuries and supplemental strength training a lot better so I think I can be a more well rounded competitor.

I know it’s a ludicrous goal, but I think chasing something like that will give me some life and be a fun project, even if the likelihood of success is <3%.

Er... wrote:

Your Can still do it!!! wrote:

It’s going to be tough but can be done. A few years back I was trying to get back into strong fitness at around 31 years old. I had zero issue running 15:10-15:20 for a road 5k. At 32 however the wheels fell off and had I been training seriously I would have probably died I have a heart condition. Don't run anymore but do a lot of Stairmaster. First thing you need to do if you are going to really hit the training hard get the Okay from a doc let him know what your intentions are and make sure you are good to go for the effort and training that you will need to do in order to crack 4:00. A little over a decade ago a rival of mine had me by about 13 years and broke 4:00 for the first time at around 37 or 39 years of age. Today more and more men over 40 are running sub 4:00 miles. Reyes Esteves from Spain is close to 50 and ran something like a 28:57 10,000m last year.

Who are these more and more men over 40 breaking 4:00?

John Whelan wrote:

56uj wrote:

Great post, John. Can you please write some details about what type of sessions you would recommend, regarding the bit quoted above?

An example progression for speed -how quick someone can progress will vary a lot depending on talent and training history. Some respond well and it may be a few weeks, for others this may take many months.

1. Strides and hill strides -accelerate up to maximum "relaxed" speed. Keep the session dose very small at first, ~5 reps. Work up the 3-4x week, then extend up 8-10 reps/session.
2. Turn a hill strides day into proper hill sprints. ~10s, walk back + 1-2min recovery between each
3. Turn a strides day into a proper speed development day. Something like flying 50m's, 120m/80m/40m breakdown, whatever. If the body can handle it I'd say do a speed, development, hill sprints, and 2 sessions of the more chill acceleration strides every week. If that's a little too much alternate weeks speed dev/hill sprints.
4. Once the body is doing well with all this short-speed stuff can start extending the reps a little bit towards more 800m-mile pace stuff, but still keep reps short enough (200m and under) and rest long enough so that a bunch of lactate/fatigue isn't being accumulated. Really just trying to work on the mechanical/neuromuscular aspects of speed.

In the old Canova threads there's some good talk about short, hills and using different types of hills to work on certain qualities of speed. For the speed dev stuff on the track Hobbs Kessler and Justin Rinaldi are a couple of recent examples that come to mind, but it's easy to look up "pure speed for distance runners" and get some good example workouts. Could also just look up what the good HS sprint programs are doing for some example workouts, but keep in mind that while speed development level might be similar between a HS sprinter and an adult distance runner the HSer can probably handle a higher frequency of intensity.

The aerobic side is just doing whatever one can to get in a bunch of fairly easy volume. However much easy running the body can handle, then some cross-training on top of that. A big part of why I recommend cross-training is that it's an easy way to get used to training 2x /day. The only aerobic-focused workouts I would use at this early stage would be very chill threshold intervals -something like reps of 5min on/60s off, slightly faster than LT1 or what most pace calculators would call "marathon pace". Could do this type of interval workout with cross-training too.

No gut-busting VO2 stuff, no big long runs, really nothing that's too hard to recover from. We're optimizing for frequency and consistency of training. For the talented athlete with a lot of experience training hard it's going to be hard to be this restrained -basically session resisting the urge to push a little harder/farther, but using that restraint to get more training in overall. If one feels limited by the top-end cardiovascular ability and needs some hard max HR work I would do that in cross-training to save the legs, since we don't really need absolute movement specificity to get a lot of the central adaptations.

Overall the training for the first 6-12months would look somewhat like combining the regiments of a HS sprinter and a cross-training heavy hobbyjogger/hobby-triathlete. It's taking the concept of funnel periodization to pretty ridiculous and remedial extremes. I think that this focus on truly foundational work is tremendously beneficial, but many of us never do it because we get so hardwired with the urgency of HS/collegiate seasons and the patterns of training that urgency demands.

high-powered biotech ceo wrote:

I'm way less talented than you (1.59/4.19/15.10/31.19/1.08 half) but in similar boat in that I feel like I left a lot on the table in my 20s, mainly due to injuries caused by my own stupidity in training.

If you have consistently take care of yourself, never got too out of shape (which it sounds like is the case), and can put together 3-4 years of insane consistency (ie do not get hurt at all costs), you can PR. And if you can PR, then you can dream about scaring 4min.

I'm 39 and since COVID have slowly turned my training from being recreational > racing-geared. My current workouts/measurables are better then when I set my 800/1600 prs as a 28yo grad student. Hopped in an 800 at a college meet for first time since 2014 this month & ran low 2. Just did 3x400 with 5min recovery at sub-60, so gunning for my 800 PR in some May/June open meets. It's fun. If you're having fun as you ratchet up the training, keep going!