Japanese 5-10K runners.

Please?

High fukkin mileage, sometimes at a painstakingly slow pace. Laying that ridulous base seems to be their secret, at least the groups that train in Boulder.

If you have only seen a handful of Japanese running training in Boulder a couple of times, you shouldn't generalize things and jump to conclusion that that's their "secret". Chances are, if they're training in Boulder, that would be their base phase. You probably saw their morning jog or warm-up.

Nobby would you please elaborate?

I am referring to 5-10K distance specialists versus marathoners.

Arrigato.

ive witnessed a couple of their 10K/Marathon groups training up to three times daily with one of the sessions very slow (roughly 5min/k and sometimes slower) Yes, they do run large amounts of volume but these speeds are not always slow.

I'm not jumping to conclusions. I had a good friend who ran a coffee shop there who was dating one of the chefs for one of the elite running groups, even though they pretty much stick to themselves. He divulged a lot of their training philosophy. And I've read similarly about their training elsewhere on this site, no less.

They do run quite a bit, yes. But in a nutshell, they do a lot of time trial type training. In general, they don't do a lot of conventional intervals like 20X400; but they do ladders like 3000m + 2000m + 1000m + 400m + 200m + 100m + 2X50m...something like that. They also do a lot of combination of time trial and what they call "build-up". For example, for 5000m, they'd do 3000m time trial go straight into a brief jogging break of, say, 200; then go straight into 3000m build-up. You start out whatever the pace you can manage but, as you start to feel better, you speed up. Ideally, you want to come to ful-speed, feeling good at the end of this 3000m B-up. I once saw Seko doing 10000m TT + 100m walking rest + 10000m B-up for his marathon preparation. Sometimes they do things like 10X1000m but the pace is not killer fast; say 2:45 to 2:50. You can probably call that more like LT training. I was talking to coach Koide once and he said, of one of his young runners, she would run a good pace, not just jog, for like 12~15k; then at the end of the workout, would do 1000m time trial at fairly good effort (not all out, but good effort). "That's enough to run 32 minutes," he said. He doesn't like intervals. He said, when he was coaching high school runners, he once did an experiment and all the runners who did intervals actually ran slower (1500 to 5k). He likes training like a solid distance run topped with what we call "stimuli" of 1km or 1 mile fast. Takahashi would do 30km run followed by a 1km fast. Basically track runners would do the similar workout.

Fine. But the way you put is, I felt, was rather misleading. I coached 8 national level female runners for a corporate team in Japan for 3 years. One girl was a 57-second 400m runner in high school and ran 4:31 for 1500m in 2 years, plus sub-34 minutes 10k for her first attempt. One other girl ran 2:38 for the marathon. Surely we didn't do as much "speed" training as most Westerners but we did sessions like 10000m time trial on track with set lap time and my job was to pace them +/- 1 second of that set time. It could get pretty tough. We did lots of time trial + build-up workouts. We did lots of sprinting work; and we did lots of pace run around 2-km per lap lake (on the road). We don't just jog to get the results we produce.

Nobby, I will concede that you are a lot closer to the situation than I am, and I didn't mean to imply that high mileage is all they ever do. But I get the impression that they run rather high mileage by our standards over here when they are not periodizing specifically for an event.

That observation is true and correct. They do do more mileage than most US runners. Some of the reasons for that is; 1) their main event (corporate teams) is ekiden relay and the distances for ekiden, if you're a man, is around 20k. Women's go as short as 3k up to 10; but main forcus is slightly longer events. And 2) they always believe that they can compete against the rest of the world in the marathon (as they have proved). If they're at that level, they train for the Olympics, not for prize money or some appearance money for road races or track. Hence their main goal naturally would become a marathon; which is actually a bit of a problem--everybody, even someone who might have a good potential for middle distance events, would move up to the marathon, sometimes too early in their career.

Now, there's also an interesting view to the distance work. Reading Seko's book, in it, he mentioned something like he poured in a lot of mileage in May, almost as much as preparation for the marathon, so he would not sharpen too early because he wanted to peak for the European track season in August. Talking about periodization, it is important that you balance stamina and speed at the right time so you won't sharpen at the wrong time (mostly too early). I noticed that there's a thread about Mottram and Webb but, from what I have seen so far, Mottram is a very smart runner and Webb is not. Webb seems to have his peak all over the place. There's no doubt that Webb is a very talented runner but, again from what I've seen, he doesn't seem to know when to peak.

There's a time to run slow and long; there's a time to run fast and sharpen. Seeing only one side of it will not complete the whole picture. Of course, they (Japanese) mainly sharpen in Japan so you probably won't see their peak workouts in Boulder...

thanks Nobby

interesting stuff, this is what LETSRUN is best for