Steve Jones's training and similarities to modern methods?

History Buff,

You're pretty well on it. Jonesy's training, although appearing to be simplistic, actually coincides with a lot of the more "modern-techy" training of today. He believes in working three major systems pretty consistently though out the year (which are included in his "Typical winter training journal") - tempos, hills, and fartleck. His approach is quite simple, though modern-day training science backs it up.

A lot of successful coaches these days follow a similar training regime, whether it be distance intervals etc, Jonesy tends to lean more on the timed intervals in comparison because a race is an effort. If you're feeling horrible but running mile intervals, the slower times can be daunting (and you're out there longer, thus running yourself further into the ground), but if you're running 5minutes intervals, whether you're running insanely fast or not, you're running 5 minutes.

His training works all systems fairly equally (depending on the timing of the race season), though no one system is overworked (example: some coaches believe in intervals, intervals, and intervals - where's the tempo? where's the threshold training?)

As per your question of the 1 minute intervals: the recovery is a typically a variation of a "float", by the end of the workout you've averaged a pretty quick pace, almost like a longer tempo with surges in the middle.

Pace-wise, it varies with the time, though normally, it's about as quick as you can complete the workout - just about everything is effort-based, like a race - you do the best of our abilities on that day.

No one workout of the training regime is killer, though it's in combining it all together where the athletes break down, and grows stronger in surviving the load.

to add:

credibility to his training regime can be found in his PRs:

How many 2:07 marathoners are also 4 minute milers?

His training stressed the body across the board to be great at any distance.

Thanks for the feedback. For whatever reason I temporarily omitted from memory the "winter" training example, namely the Monday session example. That is some really great stamina work at just below marathon pace. When I take that into context along with the timed interval or fartlek work it appears very common sense and even closer to what Mr. Canova might recommend, a lot of work in ranges at just above and below marathon pace.

Far too often I see recommendations of Tempo runs plus shorter reps such as 400s. But more often I am seeing more 1K repeats, or longer fartlek or interval reps which would cover a greater range of paces. Mr. Canova of course gives a lot of 5K reps. Perhaps with some more experimentation Jones might have moved his reps up a little and benefitted more. But it appears he was on the right track.

Effort would seem to be a very important point too. When you look at Mutai's training example, none of his interval paces are at his PR pace. His Tuesday workout is just slightly over his PR pace and Saturday's just a little bit slower. But given the totality of the effort required when also running such high volume, the effort as he indicates in the article has to be tough. Good comments regarding the benefits of timed fartlek when track interval times aren't happening on any given day.

I think one of the key strengths of Jonesy was his ability to churn out all of his basic mileage at well under 6 minute miling. Everyone knew he hammered all his runs. A lot of us at the time tried to copy, but most got injured!