Daniel's Running Formula...is it worth reading?

Its good. New stress new fitness is the most exciting thing I have ever read in my life, those graphs are amazing.

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Why settle for someone else's opinion when you can read it, try what he suggests, and find out for yourself?

It is, by the way, easily the most readable of the distance training books out there.

Don't buy it and just use the table/charts, however.

Read the first several chapters carefully. Understand the principles that he is emphasizing. Then you can see how the workouts given are only examples of how his ideas could be implemented.

Once you understand the core principles and the purposes of each type of workout, then you can more intelligently create a training program that is designed specifically for you and your training environment.

I think you would be missing the best part of his book if you just looked at the workouts and tables to determine what paces you should be running those workouts.

Really read it to understand it. Then use it and keep reading it. I think most people who have owned it for awhile have probably read parts of it dozens of times. You won't pick all of it up the first time through.

While it is called Daniel's "Running Formula", I don't think you can simply plug-in a view variable values and expect it to produce a great training plan. It seems more like a framework, to me. You have to understand the basic ideas and try out different workouts (volumes, interval lengths, paces, rest intervals, hills, etc.), lengths of phases, orders of phases, etc. to determine what is optimal for you.

His values are likely to get you in the ballpark, but it's going to require trial and error to optimize a plan for you.

Good Luck

If you know a nothing, then the book she is good.

If you know a something, then the book she is fair.

If you know a lot, then the book she is poor.

I think it is very good. There is some physiology in it but he keeps it simple so any idiot can understand it. I thought it was great.

it is the single most-effective book for producing PR's ... period

It's the gold standard. Chances are, if you've read something that you like better, it's just that person's version of Daniels.

The tables are very useful, but you should remember that they only apply to ideal conditions. Rarely will you be running in perfect weather, on perfect surfaces, with little or no residual fatigue. Under such conditions, you will have no problem hitting all of the paces. In the real world, you'll probably be slightly slower than the VDOT table suggests you should be.

Can someone post a cliff notes/idiots guide version of the book?

you can find about 5 articles that summarize the book here:

http://www.coacheseducation.com/endur.htm

here u go

http://www.coacheseducation.com/endur/jack-daniels-june-00.htm

Just check it out from a local public library and peruse it at least.

its puts stuff into layman's terms, so if you like to get really technical,probably not for you

I had no coach in high school, and by using the workouts from that book I ran low 4:20's in the 1600.

Great post.

Although we don't use any of the plans as written in the book, we use the principles as our workout plan guideline.

If you truly use Daniels' training principles you will arrive at the start line correctly trained, fresh, and uninjured more often than not.

I think it is worth the 20 bucks, even if it's available at your local library. Like the others have said, it's VERY easy to read and understand. If you could only read one book about running/training, this would probably be your best choice.

I agree with the above posts. It is an excellent book. We use the strategies and philosophies outlined in the book almost exclusively for our CC team and see outstanding results in seasonal and career development for all of our runners - talented/motivated as well as beginners/participants.

Also, as someone mentioned earlier, pay close attention to the early chapters - especially the chapters which describe the "types" of training such as threshold, aerobic etc.

The one thing that I think is really tremendous about this book is that it shows you how, AND EXPLAINS WHY, you should use your CURRENT race paces to structure your training instead of training too fast and then trying to figure out how fast you can race. This is a mistake a lot of people (of all ages) make. They run too hard in practice and then can't figure out why their races seem slow in comparison to their training.

Using Daniel's ideas has allowed our teams to pracitce at a more controlled, precise level -thus avoiding injury/illness/fatigue. We have done almost no HARD workouts over the past 2 years -plenty of "challenging" work, but never a "killer" workout. The result has been, by far, our greatest success for the most kids we have ever had. In addition, our success has come at the end of the year. We used to use harder workouts, and we would get some fast races, but it seemed like you never knew when you would get them. Our progression has been much more reliable and predictable over the past years as we have kept a tighter grip on the paces and our kids hve trained based on CURRENT race paces.