His calculated vdot conversion times rarely translate to actual race times.
His intensity work is all at threshold pace 88-92% of MHR rather than the Norwegian approach which promotes more sub-threshold pace work (83-88% of MHR).
No running professionals follow his running principles anymore. (No pro runner only does 20% of their runs at intensity. They do 5-7 intensity sessions per week)
Everything you posted is from someone that is clearly training beyond their fitness level. Your probably isn't with JD, it's being realistic of how good of a runner you currently are.
The EZ paces are an upper limit, never meant to be an absolute prescription.
VDOT conversion is very reliable across close distances, and if training is appropriately modified for the target distance it's pretty reliable from mile to marathon.
Ton's of professionals are still using his running principles. Expand out to college and HS and I'm not sure if there's anyone who's stuff is wider used in US running. Most people who are running fast in the US at any level are benefiting from Daniel's work in some way.
The threshold comparison is the wrong way to look at it. The effect of intensity and the "ideal" intensities to train at are dose and goal dependent. The fact that you're using %MHR signals you've lost the plot already anyways.
From what I see most of the issues come from misinterpretation based on the way the plans and concepts are packaged in the book. It's a little over simplified and doesn't communicate well a lot of running common sense that would facilitate better execution of training. Still a great resource to get beginning runners and coaches from 0 to functional knowledge.
The EZ paces are an upper limit, never meant to be an absolute prescription.
VDOT conversion is very reliable across close distances, and if training is appropriately modified for the target distance it's pretty reliable from mile to marathon.
Ton's of professionals are still using his running principles. Expand out to college and HS and I'm not sure if there's anyone who's stuff is wider used in US running. Most people who are running fast in the US at any level are benefiting from Daniel's work in some way.
The threshold comparison is the wrong way to look at it. The effect of intensity and the "ideal" intensities to train at are dose and goal dependent. The fact that you're using %MHR signals you've lost the plot already anyways.
From what I see most of the issues come from misinterpretation based on the way the plans and concepts are packaged in the book. It's a little over simplified and doesn't communicate well a lot of running common sense that would facilitate better execution of training. Still a great resource to get beginning runners and coaches from 0 to functional knowledge.
By far my biggest gripe with Daniels is his 800 training. I have nothing but respect for the man as he was the first major figure to really be scientific about training. However, it's telling that he didn't have much 800 success and most coaches kinda skip over him in discussions of modern 800 training.
My 2nd biggest gripe is the fanboys or hyperliteral people who interpret everything he said as gospel.
The threshold comparison is the wrong way to look at it. The effect of intensity and the "ideal" intensities to train at are dose and goal dependent. The fact that you're using %MHR signals you've lost the plot already anyways.
I had his book a long time ago but don't have a copy anymore. However I have recently listened to some of his lectures on YouTube. It did stand out to me that he didn't seem to value logging a lot of time above LT1 but well below LT2. He only incidentally programmed it with marathon pace for the sake of race specificity. But not because he thought it was a physiologically valuable pace to train at.
He did value training just below LT2 either through continuous tempo or intervals. And he warned against going above LT2 as a waste of effort, so be conservative. But the idea of doing tempos or intervals well under LT2 didn't seem very valuable to him.
And he was putting things in terms of %MHR himself so I wouldn't blame anyone for following his lead when discussing his training.
Why would it be a single value? Easy is a feeling not a specific pace.
JD pace range of easy is way too narrow. If you're going to provide a pace range it should cover the outliers. And imo there should be a pace range. Someone who runs easy too fast should increase their volume until easy pace naturally slows down and their training is properly polarized. And if they don't have time to increase total training volume, they should only increase workout volume (replace some easy days with workouts, or cut out warmup/cooldown to do more time at workout pace). And then there's a lower limit of easy pace that if you can't maintain it, you ought to reduce volume, because the stimulus is hardly different from walking. Or perhaps volume is appropriate but the workouts are being run too hard or too easy, resulting in incorrect easy pace.
"Easy is a feeling" is problematic. The first half of a marathon can feel easy. It doesn't mean that if you were going for a 13.1mi easy run that day that you should be running it at MP. There ought to be some more guidance than feelings. That's an extreme example but still the point is that "easy is a feeling" provides way too much wiggle room, giving hints of suboptimal training a place to hide.
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Why would an upper limit be a range from 8:16 - 9:06/mi instead of just a single value?
What does that even mean? It doesn't make sense to have multiple upper limits. Is the upper limit 9:06/mi or 8:16/mi? pick one.
Obviously Daniels meant to say anything within the 8:16-9:06/mi range is easy, so stop trying to suggest otherwise to give him a pass.
Assuming flat terrain and good conditions, on a normal easy run this person should run up to but no faster than 8:16 pace when they're feeling good and ideally should not be spending a lot of time running slower than 9:06 pace.
Obviously the upper limit is the faster pace. What are you trying to argue here? That the lower limit is too fast?
This post was edited 6 minutes after it was posted.
The threshold comparison is the wrong way to look at it. The effect of intensity and the "ideal" intensities to train at are dose and goal dependent. The fact that you're using %MHR signals you've lost the plot already anyways.
I had his book a long time ago but don't have a copy anymore. However I have recently listened to some of his lectures on YouTube. It did stand out to me that he didn't seem to value logging a lot of time above LT1 but well below LT2. He only incidentally programmed it with marathon pace for the sake of race specificity. But not because he thought it was a physiologically valuable pace to train at.
He did value training just below LT2 either through continuous tempo or intervals. And he warned against going above LT2 as a waste of effort, so be conservative. But the idea of doing tempos or intervals well under LT2 didn't seem very valuable to him.
And he was putting things in terms of %MHR himself so I wouldn't blame anyone for following his lead when discussing his training.
Yes this is a valid and nuanced criticism.
My point is than reducing threshold training to a %MHR without the context of the full program is nonsense. It's dose dependent. If you're doing a lot more threshold work it's going to have to be easier (i.e. Norwegian style), if you're doing less overall you can be closer to right around LT2. Both strategies has been proven successful.
Runners and coaches with critical thinking skills can disregard some of the questionable aspects of Daniel's principles while still benefiting from his work as a whole.
Ah I see the confusion. That's just bad writing on my part.
Probably unpopular but I'd still say the lower limit really shouldn't be too fast for a reasonably fit person doing fairly normal training. Again it's assuming good conditions and terrain -so weather, hills, surface, etc might push us slower but the relative effort is there.
I completely agree with his E Pace being way too intense.
Especially given that this is the lowest intensity listed in his tables.
For example, a runner with a 10k personal best of 27:24 is given an E Pace range of 5:20-6:04/mile (3:19-3:46/km).
Go on Strava and try to find a single elite runner that's never running slowing than 6:04/mile. I doubt you'll be able to find many (if any) that ever run faster than 6:00/mile on what would be considered an "easy run".
It's certainly perpetuated the tendency for runners to run way too fast on their easy days. Elites are not doing this.
Calling Daniels a "charlatan" is absurd. He's one of the giants of exercise science, and he's also a real coach who has worked with many of the best American runners of the last 50+ years. I do think that some of his advice is outdated, though.
As xel noted, Daniels hasn't historically considered paces slower than LT2 to be meaningful workout paces. He throws marathon pace in there for marathoners, but he thinks it's largely a psychological workout. Modern training, on the other hand, places a huge amount of emphasis on paces from LT1 to LT2. Double thresholds are run at those intensities, for instance. It's worth noting that this isn't entirely a new phenomenon; it's trendy now, but most athletes doing "tempo runs" in the 70s and 80s were going slower than LT2. It's largely because of Daniels that people came to think of tempo pace as maximum lactate steady state.
I think another reason that slower tempos have come into vogue is because the influence of Canova made marathon specific training so much more popular. Elites and high level amateurs started doing tons of MP mileage while training for marathons, and they realized that they were also getting incredibly strong aerobically, in a way that carried over to shorter distances as well.
The other huge difference between Daniels and modern training is the emphasis on avoiding "grey zones" between target paces. According to Daniels, we run at specific paces to stimulate specific adaptations, and paces between those will give you less bang for your buck. For instance, 10k pace would be a no-man's land between VO2max pace and LT1, so not a useful training stimulus. Athletes today hit all the paces. It can be particularly useful in the context of year-round training, where you want to maintain what you've built even if it's not your primary training emphasis. So if you're in a specific phase for the marathon, for instance, you can run "B" workouts that alternate between 3k, 5k, and 10k pace. It will maintain that high end aerobic capacity that you worked on earlier, but it takes less out of you than just doing straight 3k work.
And yet, even though I disagree with a lot of Daniels, I think he gets a ton right.
If you look at the training of modern athletes, a lot of it still fits the Daniels mold pretty well. While we might be a little less rigid about the zones, VO2max pace and LT2 pace are still mainstays (the latter more commonly as intervals than as straight tempos these days). His periodization also holds up pretty well. And his use of R pace for true distance runners is also pretty modern. (It was always in his books, but even a lot of Daniels-influenced coaches didn't do much of that faster running 20-30 years ago, whereas now, distance runners do a lot more work at faster paces.)
Daniels was also hugely important for the resurgence of American distance running because the book was widely available, and it's well suited to coaching high school and college runners. In the 90s and early 00s, there was far less information out there about coaching. It's one of the reasons this website got so huge. People were desperate for this stuff. Daniels provided an easy to apply formula to train an entire team. The pace tables were invaluable. (Seriously, it's hard to imagine now, but a lot of coaches used to just say that workouts should be about as hard as possible. e.g., if we were doing 12x400 w/ 1 minute rest. we should run them even, but at the fastest possible average pace.)
The specific paces he emphasized were also fairly race-specific for cross country runners, so even though there's nothing magic about VO2max pace, it ends up getting you into good race shape. It also worked well for middle distance runners at the time because the guys they were competing against all overemphasized anaerobic training.
Finally, I think if you're going to criticize Daniels, you should be careful to read what he actually wrote, especially in later editions of his book. If you summarize his philosophy in a nutshell and look at his plans, it seems pretty rigid, but if you really get into the text of the book, you'll see a lot more flexibility and nuance. One key point that a lot of people miss is that the formula paces are supposed to be based on your most recent performance, not your PR or your goal. Some of the workouts or weeks that look like monsters aren't actually that scary if you're being honest about your paces. (Years ago, I was presenting a training schedule at a coaching course--probably my Level 2--and I recall an instructor saying, "well, if your plan was to focus on VO2max, these intervals should be at 3k pace, not at 5k pace like you specified." I said, "when's the last time you told your athletes to run 5k pace and they didn't actually run 3k pace?" Daniels assumes you're being totally honest about paces, which is totally fair for a book. It's up to the coach to figure out how to implement it, either by giving slower target paces or by being super rigid about athletes following instructions.)
Jack Daniels is awesome. But most of his work is aimed at amateur runners... say 16-25 minutes in the 5k for a male. Faster runners already have coaches and don't need his books. Trying to train like the pros when you are an 18 minute 5ker is silly.
Easy paces aren't a "one size fits all" sort of thing. Some people need to go slower. Some faster. And it varies day by day.
The "Norwegian approach" to threshold training is one of many fads that comes and goes. And it wasn't invented in Norway. It isn't better or worse than Jack's approach.
VDOT conversions aren't supposed to translate to actual race times. If you are a natural miler, your 10k+ times are going to suck. If you are a natural marathoner, your 1 mile times are going to suck.
One of my favorite lessons from his books is to try speeding up when we are tired instead of slowing down. Sometimes just running the same, monotonous pace with the exact same body movements is what is making us tired. When I feel like maintaining a pace is too hard for me, I tell myself "Relax and speed up". It often works. And when it doesn't, I was screwed anyway. So it was worth a try.
I also learned that we can warm up for a race much more intensely than we realize. I used to have huge negative splits and actually felt better in the second half of the race. More intense warmups helped me a lot.
Oh, and he does have 2 Olympic team medals in the modern pentathlon. So he's not just a science geek... he has street cred too!
Daniel's book is probably the best comprehensive intro to running that we have. If every high school coach was required to read it before starting the job, we would have a lot less kids doing stupid training.
It's not perfect, and we have certainly learned a lot more about training since the 90s, but no one has been able to put it all in an easily digestible format like his sense.
I bought his book around 2003 when I was first getting into running. It sent me down the wrong path for almost 2 decades. That’s time I’ll never get back.
The problem with JD is that doing one V02, one tempo, and one speed workout per week (or at least 2 of those Q sessions) is not the optimal way to build your aerobic engine.
If I had focused on THRESHOLD and sub-t workouts, like 5 x mile @ HM pace (instead of 6 x 800 @ 5K pace) I would have gotten a lot further. Biggest revelation in the last few years (for me) is that anything faster than LT2 is overrated.