Does threshold not work for certain types of runners?

Threshold workouts provide an important stimulus and are a good part of basically any decent training plan for a distance runner (for various distances).

But “the way” you seem to be referring to is a very specifically developed kind of “sweet spot” training, where the whole, over time, is greater than the sum of the parts.

You might benefit from reading the first few pages of the thread on it here.

I highly doubt the method would work equally well for everybody, but there’s one caveat noted frequently on that thread: the people who say they’re doing that style of training yet have poor results tend to be the ones with significant departures from the kind of training recommended there.

Threshold is just one component of a good training plan and these broken up threshold runs you described are just one type of threshold you should do. Without traditional reps or speed work, you probably won't run a good 5/10. The good news is that work will now be easier than it would be without the weeks of doing those threshold reps.

Continuous tempos and progression runs are other important things to do.

The training you describe is a big component in my base phase before getting ready to race.

Doing it for a few weeks and not getting a personal best doesn't mean it doesn't work. It's like when someone ups their weekly mileage for a few weeks or when a gym bro changes his routine and doesn't get a new bench press 1RM immediately concludes it doesn't work. It takes time, it's not over night.

Ok this is the thing, I DID read the giant thread on this and I was copying my homework from sirpoc's strava himself. The only difference was that I was doing less overall volume so I cut it to two threshold workouts instead of his three workouts. But the work was the same just doing a rotation of 10x 3 minutes, 6x 5 minutes, and 3x 10 minutes with the paces adjusted for the duration but, again mostly starting out in that half marathon est. pace and then working down to 10k (maybe 15k pace for the longest reps and just slower than 5k pace for the shorter reps). This was essentially my base for last fall but even then I barely improved from the start of the block to the end of it and results compared to the previous year doing different training weren't markedly better either. It just surprised me that I put in a few months of work that I felt should have yielded at least some improvement but it was nowhere to be found on the results page or in how I felt.

Conventional LT 2 pace, ( ~ 88% Max Heart Rate, being SLOWER than 10k pace) is a good pace. Doing it a couple of times a week generally shouldn’t be a problem, for solid base building. However, you might be able to get more volume in if you hold off on that pace for a while. But when it starts getting closer to a 5k race, you’re going to want to get some faster stuff in (besides the lower volume component of striders which you might be doing year round.)

At least a couple of people on the thread and maybe the Strava group have said that the third session makes the difference. It doesn't seem such a fundamental jump going from 2 to 3 but maybe it's like going from singles to doubles and you get a disproportionate extra benefit from that particular quality/easy/recovery ratio.

Did you try 3 sessions even on your lower volume and just scaling the sub-T down as well so it still made up 25% of weekly time?

Is there any other way that you deviated from the plan? Some people are running easy days too "fast", doing hills or 5K pace too regularly (more than say a 5K race every 3-4 weeks).

Slow down, you're moving too fast

You've got to make the moment last

The singles method is all about maximum repeatable load.

if your overall load before this method was more than you will mostly not improve.

the method “expects” you to maximise your load with the 3 subT session at 15k, 20k and 30k paces, if you are only doing two sessions you load will be less than a classical speed + tempo sessions. Easy runs / long run are the recovery runs at Z1 HR or 70% MAS so you recover from the workouts

its not fast, sexy or stravatastic just continuous consistency week on week, month on month, quarter on quarter.

If you are fast twitch or slow twitch you recovery runs will probably be the thing that is different, either shorter/longer, faster/slower

There fundamental idea behind threshold training is that the primary limiting factor in training is muscle recovery time. If muscle tone (damage) was not a thing, we would all be spending hours on the track doing race repeats with full aerobic recovery. That is not possible, because while your cardio system bounces back quickly (10-30 minutes), your muscles take hours or days to recover from a hard effort.

By training right on the edge of that steep blood lactate incline after LT2, one can minimize muscular damage and thus minimize necessary recovery time. This allows for significantly greater volume of aerobic stimulus. Double threshold is just one variant, but it is particularly effective because it groups all of that high-quality aerobic work into a single daily block with a REM sleep in between.

Importantly, this doesn't mean you should only do threshold. You can still do plenty of stuff faster than threshold - in fact it is ideal, because higher intensity work does still yield more benefits, as long as you recover properly. Once a week is enough time for your muscles to recover typically.

It's also a myth that threshold is a particular pace or "zone". The goal of threshold is to push the heart rate as high as possible (highest amount of cardiovascular stress) with as little muscle damage as possible. VO2max is the slowest pace that maxes out your heart rate, so ideally you would like to be fairly close to that. Unfortunately, blood lactate starts to rise quickly around this pace, so running at VO2max pace requires very short intervals with short rests (like the Ingebrigtsen 400s, where they run around 5k race pace with 30-60s rest). These are effective, but while your heart rate will peak near max, it will regularly be fluctuating down during the rest period. So something like 1k or 2k repeats at a slower pace (10k-half marathon) are typically preferred, because they will often result in a higher average heart rate throughout the workout (but a lower peak). Something like a continuous 30-40 minute tempo would theoretically have the highest average heart rate, due to having zero rest time, but it would peak far below max heart rate. It's an ongoing debate which matters more in threshold training, but the general consensus right now is that <=1 minute rest is ideal, and repeats of 1-10 minutes are also ideal. If you have found repeats in that zone to not work for you, you may want to try faster (30-45s intervals at 3k race pace?) or slower (continuous tempos) workouts for your threshold work, while also incorporating a faster day 1/week.

So, according to your overlong hypothesis,🥱 high lactate causes muscle damage.

Try again.

Where did I say that blood lactate causes muscle damage? Blood lactate is a measure of stress. It happens to be a byproduct of the exact type of exercise that causes muscle damage, making it by far the best indicator of the damaging effects of a stressor. Correlation =/= causation, but correlation IS extremely useful for prediction.

Here's a nice study demonstrating this:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Using blood lactate concentration to predict muscle damage and jump performance response to maximal stretch-shortening cycle exercise - PubMed

Blood lactate concentration could be used as a predictor of muscle damage levels after maximal SSC exercise, which supports the results found in other studies, although after eccentric exercise. However, it cannot predict acu...

Open link

So you're doubling down on your wrong hypothesis?

Try again. Because, you're conflating high lactate with muscle damage.

Expecting magic from any workout will lead to disappointment.

In distance running, mileage will always be the cake; speedwork, the icing.

Ok, so I went through my training and did a bit more of a full "post mortem" on this training block that I intended as my threshold experiment. Beginning in June, after two weeks of just basic running to get back into it, I added the two sessions starting with 6x 3 mins, 4x 5 mins, and 2 x 10 mins (as my first session the next week and then repeating). On the 4th of July I did a 5k in 20:26 which is about where I expected to start. I also built mileage from about 20 in my first two weeks back to running up into the 30s/40s in July/August and then into the upper 40s/50s in September and October. During this time I got in two more 5ks, one in August in 19:59 and one in October in 20 flat. Had some niggling issues before the second 5k and by the end of October I needed a break. I did manage a Turkey Trot but that was basically back where I started in 20:35.

So in this post-mortem I did 5 months of threshold training and some pretty high mileage relative to my lifetime highest weeks but I was still stuck in the 20 minute range for basically all my 5ks. I wasn't expecting magic results or to miraculously run close to my decade old PB but I was surprised by the lack of improvement. Again, I'm someone who typically falls apart as distance goes up so I was hoping this training would work on a weakness but it seemed to do me very little good in any way. I really have been struggling to understand why it was so ineffectual, despite what I felt was giving it good go.

I'd recommend watching Steve Magness' YouTube vid released yesterday on individualizing training. Really explained why I went backwards doing the NSM for 4 months and why I feel like my legs lost all spring/power and why someone like sirpoc succeeded with it. Neglecting strengths and focusing only on weaknesses in my case. You might just need a better balance depending on the make up of your body.

Likewise my PR was off much lower mileage than I have got up to doing the NSM. I think it's got to come down to muscle fibres or biomechanics.

Threshold training is basically a more refined version of the steady state running Lydiard advocated for, especially during base training. It gets you strong and fit for the sharpening sessions later on during the peaking phase. And while you can definitely run fast and set new personal best off of it. To max out your potential you'll need to add some harder workouts. The reason I think people have found so much success in just threshold sessions as their only workout is the consistency and volume they can do at it.

What are you doing for easy run, at what pace(s)?

What are you doing for your long run, at what pace(s)?

How long was the break before June? How long was the October break?

I could be mistaken, but I had the understanding that it was recommended for a person to be roughly at their expected mileage when beginning the training, rather than adding mileage while starting it. I know you say you kept it to two days a week rather than 3 to reduce load. So maybe you feel as though that’s enough to offset the load of adding mileage.

Easy runs were usually 8:30-8:50s.

Long runs were usually a bit quicker as I'd run them progressively but average of about 8:10-8:30.

The break before this was short, basically took a week totally off and then did two weeks of easy running before the June threshold start. Just before the break I had done a mile time trial in 5:22 (more my bread and butter distance) off of faster oriented training. I'd also done an 800 that spring in 2:26, which I was pretty disappointed with given that I'd been doing workouts with 2:20 in mind and maybe faster. The training for this block looked a lot more like my typical training: one more aerobic session (miles/1ks/800s) and one mile/800 session (400s/300s/200s).