Have ordered my first running book in almost 10 years to brush up on the latest research on training athletes to run the marathon.
I have followed John Davis for a number of years and he post some good stuff on his blog.
Has anyone read parts of this book? He did send me the first chapter and table of contents which was nice of him.
I wasn't one of the beta testers but ordered the book on release day based solely off of the author's credibility due to his previous short ebooks and his posts on reddit.
Could have been called "Canova for Casuals."
It's too late in my marathon build right now to switch plans but there's a ton of helpful information in here if you are on another plan.
For me, a 3:00-3:30 casual, zero-talent, Hanson's guy, the only thing that is scary is that the long runs look pretty intimidating. I think in the spring, I'll probably run the Wind plan (level 2, 50-60mpw) with Breeze plan (level 1) long runs.
The midweek stuff looks very easy, and there isn't epic midweek runs like Pfitz, if time constraints during the week are a thing for you, this is huge.
One thing that stuck out to my a lot is the "5k crash course", a way to get back into workouts quickly after a period of easy mileage. This is going to be really helpful to me after the summer.
I do wish the book had an index, that would be pretty helpful. It is a massive tome with a lot of information in different places (though written very well).
Interestingly, it's self-published, but beats Human Kinetics and Velo Press in terms of typesetting and print quality. There's a mention about "RW Publishing" on the imprint page. I hope this means there's more coming.
Shillin'.
Lol no.
I'm sure if the author wanted shills, he'd be able to find someone better than a letsrun anon who's so terrible at running that they can't hack Pfitzinger.
I don't think he's the type to hire shills, though.
I got my copy last week.
Its an excellent overall resource - really up to date on latest physiology resource, and he does a great job walking through how to apply that to training. As stated above, the plans are extremely Canova-oriented, which means getting used to percentage soup for all the workouts. Obviously I have no experience with the plans directly yet, but John's excellent writing led me to heavily Canova-ify my recent marathon block, which led to a big PR and I felt really prepared me for race day. I'll definitely be looking to follow one of the book's plans pretty closely for my next build.
My only negative criticism would be:
1. Its unfortunate that the studies referenced in the book are only listed online in a PDF, and that PDF doesn't have direct pubmed IDs or links (which should be a minimum requirement in 2025)
2. I strongly suspect that beginners should not attempt the lowest "Breeze" plan unless they are strongly motivated. Not necessarily because it is too hard, but because that level of granulated pacing is going to be pretty hard for a newer runner to pull off, and there is so much low hanging fruit that I think any straightforward plan with decent mileage and quality is going to work. A newbie is probably much better just doing a Pftiz or JD plan with 4-5 different paces
I haven’t finished reading it, but so far I’d definitely recommend even if you don’t want to follow one of his plans.
One issue I’ve always had is a lot of training programs have “easy” running and they have workouts, but there is not much elaboration on what “easy” is. I think he does a good job breaking down “easy” running in a way a new runner can actually implement e.g. differentiating between things like a pure recovery day, an easy get in the miles day, and a harder aerobic day that is still slower than any workout pace you’d see in most books (eg 90% of MGP). I think a lot of experienced runners running by feel might fall into getting these things right, but I think it is very helpful to see it written down explicitly. Pfitzinger alludes to these kind of things, but isn’t that explicit and authors like Daniels completely ignore them.