Trevor Painter shares the secrets of the world's top mid-d training group: "We are definitely not a double threshold group."

There's a school of thought that women need to do more anaerobic training than men to make up for the natural gap in anaerobic capacity due to hormone profile. I wonder if M11's success is due to developing a training model specifically for women rather than replicating men's training.

I never thought about that but it makes complete sense to me. I’ve seen guys - even ones without too much leg speed - run very respectable times in 800/1500/mile season opening rustbusters with barely (if at all) having touched any race pace work. Yet not at all for the reverse

One thing that was interesting was in the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games, where Athing Mu and Keely Hodgkinson, went 1-2. Both ran negative splits, which is unusual for this distance. Also, both are lower-mileage trainers. Both were teeens.

They were coached by two very different people in different places.

Common to see women and men train about 60-70 miles or 100 to 115kms per week during the off-season for the 800m. But there are always outliers. But two similar outcomes (Mu and Hodgkinson in 21 Tokyo) are unlikely to be outliers given the results.

So, the question is, are there are a number of naturally talented runners who are doing more volume than necessary? And with this unique distance and time it takes to run it, are there others who drastically need bigger mileage (ala Peter Snell)?

Where as with any distance longer, 1500m and up, the training start to look more and more the same the longer the distance.

I still think the secret is the relative fiber type of these diff athletes. Not that we are trying to find who is "right". Having said that, i have not cracked the mystery of how someone who does have more fast twitch fiber types and is low mileage trainer can roll that into something longer like the 800 (vs the 2 and 4). Its a mind bender. Maybe it's even more type 2a specifically vs anything else. Super specific athlete. Now he said "middle distance" not just 800. I would think a miler and SC would have to optimize some aerobic training, its just a fact that it is a big contributor to these events. I mean there are olympic milers who become world record holders in the marathon. There is such a hole in our knowledge of racing MD. Maybe we start biopsying every ones muscle at the beginning of the season. I would have signed up for it. Barely more invasive than blood lactate testing.

It's nice to hear of a top group that still has a periodized approach to the full year and has a coach that hasn't just latched onto the hottest new trend and simply applied it to their group without really understanding it or it's long term consequences.

I really have a feeling that in the next 2-3 years you are going to see a lot of issue for athletes that adopted the full year "DT" approach which on the surface seems like it's more long term sustainable because of the lack of ultra-intense workouts, the problem being they have been replaced with incredible volume of slightly less intense workouts.

I personally think this is why Jakob is in a bit of trouble here, I wonder if his body has reached it's breaking point in terms of the still high intensity volume accumulated over the last 4-5 years as a professional.

Back to Painter, good for him - I like the comment about about taking into consideration the athletes life off the track. So important - running is just running, it's not life or death.

Ever had a muscle biopsy, especially one of a muscle like the quads? TOTALLY more invasive that lactate testing. Plus there's some recent evidence that there is large variation in Type 1 and Type 2 at slightly different locations in the same large muscle.
Ultrasound and functional MRI may be able to answer these types of questions in the future, but muscle biopsy is not the way.

Seems like we cant win though. The majority of my athletes get overuse or stress fracture when ramping up intensity relatively speaking, not mileage. But im sure it goes both ways.

maybe there's a secret he's still not sharing!

No it's not an easy balancing act. But intensity itself isn't the real issue is it? It's how quickly the intensity goes up, the volume of it and what adaption you are allowing for it.

Also speaking from experience here, looking back I believe I did was particularly bad with points 1 and 3. I would come off winter buildup and want to run far too fast too quickly and then I would basically keep my workout schedule fundamentally consistent with anaerobic capacity/power work as I would with aerobic capacity/power work when really I should have been giving myself an extra 24 hours minimum of recovery.

I ignorantly believed all "workout" or "high intensity" was a fundamentally equal stress on the body. A hard fartlek session or step down session (8-6-4-3-2-1 etc) in February was the same as running 5 sets of 4x200 in 27-28 on the track with a short rest in April. I got that totally wrong but part of that was just being young, super motivated and desperate to just absorb as much training as I could to make me better. If I could do it again I would actively force myself to transition to the track considerably slower and increase my recovery/adapation times by at least a day, maybe two. I was lucky I didn't break down with stress fractures, but looking back I think I capped my ultimate ceiling because I was slightly overdone from training and once you start competing it's impossible to get that adaption time back.

Makes sense to me for 800m. It's funny how the 1500m runners doing double threshold (or generally training higher mileage and more aerobically) have inadvertently become gold medalist 5000m runners.

Keely has run the 51 in the open 400m. She tore her hamstring this year, which I'd imagine was from anaerobic / strength / speed work in pursuit of a faster 400m. Her goal is the WR (1:52.28) and the ability to run 50.0 would be nice for going after that. When coach says "she is currently at 51.61" it sounds to me like they're not done trying to improve that.

But the point is I think she's still aggressively training for more speed to chase the WR when a more conservative approach would be to see how much more aerobic training she could do and still maintain sub 52 speed. She's only 23 and 1500m runners like Faith and Georgia Hunter Bell are 31 so I imagine if she has a long-term plan to expand to the 1500m like Bell, it's after a few more years of working on speed, at least through 2028?

Why don't we just leave coaching at that? No reason to throw shade at any method, finding the method that maximizes the athlete is best. Statistically certain methods maximize more athletes but when you are coaching only a few athletes at the highest level that doesn't matter.

"We are definitely not a double threshold group" Keely is a 400/800 runner of course she's not doing double threshold. Why would this even be news?

"I personally think this is why Jakob is in a bit of trouble here, I wonder if his body has reached it's breaking point in terms of the still high intensity volume accumulated over the last 4-5 years as a professional." Keely was also injured a bunch this year are you worried her lack of volume is causing her body to reach a breaking point?

This site is brain dead (but so am i)

Yeah you are brain dead.

I don't even understand the point you are trying to make. First of all, you can still be doing a high overall volume of mileage (winter) with a more anaerobic focus (summer). KH was injured in the winter - how do you know that wasn't a function of whatever she was doing in her buildup phase? Yeah, you don't.

Secondly, there is absolutely a narrative right now amongst coaching philosophy, that moving away from higher intensity anaerobic workouts is better overall for the athlete - less day to day recovery needed (why guys are able to do 2 sessions a day) and is allowing near race fitness for 9 months of the year (which is also seen as some kind of plus). So in the short term it seems desirable - athletes aren't waking up with the same aches and pains associated with doing a hard anaerobic session the day before, but they are trading that for large amounts of "easier" volume that we really don't what the long term impacts are because it's only been the fad for the last 2-3 seasons.

The one guy we do know that has been doing this for a concentrated period of time (Jakob) just sat out an entire outdoor season with the same injury he started having the season prior.

You think the human body just has endless capacity for absorbing large amounts of physical stress? You are brain dead.

What I hate about stories like this is they always explain how they needed to increase speed, and implying that speed is the limiting factor to being elite, but they never explain how they got their top-end sprint speed improved by ~10%.

It's highly unlikely she goes from like a 13.5 100m to an 11.9 by just doing 200m/400m/800m/3000m paces like they said they do in the summers.

Surely they're doing the occasional sprint training days like a typical sprinter would.

And yet, if Keely had instead radically improved her aerobic ability, she might have been able to run back to back 57s to win World's in 1:54 with just a 54 or 55 400m pr.

In a lot of Europe, there has been a focus on speed and hard short sessions among middle distance groups for a long time. Middle school and high school 800m-3k runners were doing three or more weekly sessions primarily of sprintwork in Germany, which is to say, something like drills, stride outs, and a series of near max sprints going from 30m up to 200m, rarely anything higher, on full rest. The focus on form work was producing results--really good form at speed, but the lack of aerobic fitness meant that they were underachieving a bit at 800m and a lot at the higher distances, and they were also typically slower by quite a bit by the end of high school than in comparable areas in the United States.

Anyone have any theories on why they don’t do 1500 pace sessions at all by the sounds of things? I get the talk is 800 training but see as they do over distance training I struggle to see why they seemingly never incorporate 1500 pace

This is more of an abstract observation than anything else but I think the differing philosophy among women's middle distance and long sprint coaches is very, very interesting. Just to bring up 400m training for a moment as an example - there is debate among many higher level coaches as to the amount of aerobic training women need for the 400m.

You have people going in every which way and finding success, which leads me to believe its more individual than anything else.

Also, originally only men competed in track and field, and so many of the things we take for granted about training were derived from that. Perhaps we need to re-think a lot more about this sport.

It just seems odd that you're blaming Jakob's injury on the style of training he does. I feel like most professional runners go through injuries most of which don't use the Norwegian method - some recent examples Hocker, Kerr, Keely, Wightman.

So what's your point? That double threshold doesn't make you impervious to injuries? No kidding Mr. Big Brain