For most runners, is there anything actually wrong with Daniels?

I think the workouts are decent and if you are going to coach an outstanding high school team you may as well make it easy on everyone to understand the program by following something like Daniels. But if you ever want a few of your athletes to be runaway successes then you need to allow for some periods of real mileage where the kid accumulates volume to develop red blood cells and learns to love running. Daniels has you being a slave to the watch and hanging out at the track all the time, which is good for a lot of kids doing it socially as a sport, but not for the standout athletes who are going to grow up to be elite.

Smoove wrote:

theJeff wrote:

As a coach, I will say that Daniels casts the biggest net out of any philosophy in terms of helping your team improve, but I have certainly had some athletes under-respond (imho) to it.

Not necessarily directly on topic, but when that happens, have you experimented with the balance of threshold work and vo2max work for that athlete? Or experimented with different types of threshold work (tempo runs v. cruise intervals)? Worked in more rep work? Generally speaking, when I have had people under-respond under a particular approach, I can get a response by adjusting one of those things.

Actually, I am this year... I am pairing Daniels' Reps/Hills with Tinman's CVs in one block, and pairing Intervals w Tempo (straight phase 3) in another block. So far, I have been pleased with the results. Mixing up the "just above T" with "just below T" seems to illicit a better response than straight T work throughout...

Probably also beside the point, but I am doing 3-week micro blocks (2 weeks up, 1 week down) instead of full 6-week blocks that Daniels builds from. P1, P2, P3, P2, P3, P4...

The one year when I was following Daniels plan promptly was my far best season so far. I went from 1:21 to 1:17 in half and broke all my personal records from 3k to 10k. After that year I started to experiment with my training (by going faster on E days) and in fact I injured myself several times.

The most important thing that I learned from my experience is to run the Daniels E pace truly easy. Daniels has stated that over and over again here on LRC and also in his videos that you need to go easy on E days to be fully recovered and ready for quality sessions. But people somehow seem to neglect it at some point. That is a huge mistake by most of us.

The one season I mentioned above I was doing all my easy runs at the slowest E pace and very often my average pace for E runs was no faster than 9:00/mile with sometimes going as slow as 9:30/mile.

The fact that Daniels has an E pace tells you all you need to know. Easy is easy. The body is the best judge of that. Even the slower end of Daniels E pace may be too fast.

HRE wrote:

it's not a cake wrote:

Everyone follows it like a recipe and that leads to disaster.

That's the problem with trying to sell a formula.

This. In spades and it's not a problem limited only to Daniels. Anytime you turn a training plan into The Tablets From Sinai you're going to have trouble no matter the plan. So I think the thing that so many people find appealing about Daniels, the precise formulas, are also the greatest weakness. But I think that as with any other program, if you know how to use and adapt it you'll be fine.

Spot on HRE! :) I myself use his "exact" paces as a part of my system. But I also mix with old great coaches like W.Gerschler , Franz Stampfl , Arthur Lydiard and Canova ( still active and alive). And then I put the cream on the cake with my own designed specific long run. And to be a good coach you have to adapt the system to the runner and not the other way around. For example I coach a former 1.43 800m runner ( bronze in world champs) to become a strong long distance road runner, and the 20 x 400m at 62-64 sec is no problem. When he does the longer LT-intervals there is still problem for him to run the usual gap between maxVO2-reps and LT- reps , so he needs a little bit slower LT-intervals .

I was wondering when you would show up.

It overcomplicates something very straightforward.

Runners train at widely differing paces and achiever similar results.

Malmo mentioned hard and steady paces that's good enough for most marginal gains is f all use if you don't get 90© there.

Most good runners just do Intervals as fast as they can providing in similar times. Why Make something enjoyable info some nerd stats exercise? Retorical question given how many runners are nerds,!

As someone who is not a physiologist, I also found Daniels's explanations very helpful for crafting my own plans. Enlightening and empowering for me.

I appreciate the critiques about the value of the "in-between" paces, and I have learned from those critiques. Still, my experience is that they have helped me modify my use of Daniels, not replace everything I've learned from him.

calf and a half wrote:

Thinking of regular, ok-to-good runners (not beginners or elites), is there anything actually substantially wrong with Daniels' approach, workouts, paces, etc?

In other words, if someone who's basically fit wanted to follow a structured system, is there any reason for it not to be Daniels?

There are 2 main reasons to not follow it:

1) It's not individualized to an individualized athlete. Every athlete has an ideal training program for them that will differ from every other athlete, even if just slightly, to accommodate their unique needs.

2) As a formula, it doesn't allow for adjustments with the ebb and flow of a season. An athlete always does best when they listen to the feedback their body gives and adjusts things as necessary throughout the season. Sometimes your schedule calls for a long run, but you're beat up, so you run 5-6 very easy and recover and miss the long run that week but by recovering you don't get injured or burnt out and have a better season.

Good discussion and useful comments. I tried to categorise them for simplicity and got the list below, by number of mentions. The top two are related but are not the same thing, and taken together show that its formulaic approach is the only really consistent criticism. To that, I would agree with Smoove, HRE, deeply flawed in that you should understand and use the underlying ideas, not turn to a page and run exactly what's written in a sample plan. Obviously it's a book not a personal coach.

6 - cookie cutter, recipe approach - not individualised

4 - takes no account of variation in FT/ST mix in race equivalences or training paces. (And is weighted towards FT)

3 - unnecessarily complicated, you should train by feel/effort

2 - workouts too hard/aggressive or too frequent

1 - lack of evidence for training outcomes

1 - not enough allowance for personal judgement based on how you feel

ukathleticscoach wrote:

It overcomplicates something very straightforward.

Runners train at widely differing paces and achiever similar results.

Malmo mentioned hard and steady paces that's good enough for most marginal gains is f all use if you don't get 90© there.

Most good runners just do Intervals as fast as they can providing in similar times. Why Make something enjoyable info some nerd stats exercise? Retorical question given how many runners are nerds,!

Having a formula and/or a set of times that you should run can be useful. But as Lydiard would point out, the same time for a run can inflict different degrees of difficulty on the same runner at different times, i.e., a session of 12 x 400 at 65 may be manageable and productive one day and overly demanding on another because the runner is less rested, more stressed, coming down with a cold that's not quite shown up, etc. So that runner may exert just the proper amount of effort to do the session one time but cross the borderline from training to straining the next time that session comes along and therefore may need to run the reps more slowly in that second case. or even bag the session, rather than tear himself down trying to hit those goal times. And in other cases the runner may be flying and have a day when 63s come with no more effort than the 65s normally do. If nothing else you get a tremendous mental boost from a day like that.

I'm with you. I think Daniels makes something simple unnecessarily complicated. But I am not generally a "precise" sort of guy and was perfectly happy just going out and busting a hard run with some regularity. But there are people who value precision, who want to know that their 10 mile run was not really 10.1 or 9.8. I can see where people like that would respond to something like Daniels if they can use it rather than be ruled by it.

HRE, I agree with you that the tables are both one of the greatest values of Daniels' books and also the biggest weakness. They are the biggest weakness because, when used properly, they can be so useful that people assume that they should always be followed. Those people are wrong.

I don't think that someone who has read Daniels would feel compelled to hold 65s for their 400s in the circumstances you are discussing. In fact, if they read the text, they would understand what the purpose of a 12 x 400 workout is in the overall training plan.

In this case, the purpose of 12 x 400 in a Daniels world is to improve running economy. Daniels spends a fair amount of time in the text of his book discussing how if your form is breaking down in a running economy workout because you are going harder than you can sustain, then not only are you not accomplishing the goal of the workout, you are undermining the workout. Just doing a quick glance, I found (all in Chapter 9 of the 2nd Edition of DRF):

- this point by him on what "R" pace is: "[A] variety of training paces can be set aside for repetition work."

- this point by him regarding recovery periods for such a workout: "If the recovery is not adequate, stress mounts, mechanics deteriorate and the purpose of the training is destroyed."

- this point by him "If you reach a point at which resting four times longer than your're running is not enough rest, either you've had enough for that particular session or the pace has been too fast and you should slow it down for the next run."

These are not the words of a guy who is trying to lock someone into specific cookie-cutter paces. This are the words of a guy who is trying to impart general principles to be used in training, and then includes data that can be used as a starting point in finding out how to apply those principles to your particular circumstances.

The biggest weakness with Daniels and any other plan is that we don't have RCTs (randomized controlled trials) to know what works and what doesn't work. Training is an art, not a science. The tables make it seem like it is a science, and that can be very misleading, as people attempt to follow the plan to a T when there is no scientific reason for doing so.

World class runners don´t train that way. They don´t use clearly separated paces and nothing between. They train at every possible pace from jogging to pure sprinting. The emphasis depends on distance and time of year. Daniels idea of "junk paces" is nonsense.

I'm not a Daniels guy, but anyone serious about running or who wants to understand training should read his book. It's one of the best introductions to the physiology of training out there. I'm thinking of trying a strict Daniels approach to my next goal race just to see what it's like.

I suspect that Daniels's emphasis on zones, paces, and energy systems is not the correct theory of training, but there are some very successful athletes and coaches who use it - see NAU, for example. In the world of sports science, that's pretty solid evidence that Daniels is at least an effective approach.

sub_3_is_the_goal wrote:

My only problems with Daniels are pretty superficial. I find the workouts to be a little complex and annoying (4E + 2T + 4M + 4E + 2T etc. etc.). Who can remember all that? I also find the marathon programs too hard. He has you doing workouts that seem almost impossible to this sub-3 target guy.

Just go and read Cerruty's books.

You are all making it too complicated. Work towards fitness. Run run run. Just keep running. Body weigth strengthening. Efficient technique.

Go Paleo Training.

This is the attitude that I find most challenging. "Just run" doesn't make a ton of sense - performance has improved so much since good old Percy's time, why would we ignore the things that we have learned over that time?

I really have no idea why "5 x 1000 at current 5k pace with 1:1 work to rest" or "20 minutes at a comfortably hard pace or the pace at which you could answer a question but not maintain a conversation or at x pace" and similar workouts are deemed "too complicated" or "making things harder than they need to be." We are all bright people - it should be that challenging to absorb some fairly straightforward principles.

The most complicated Daniels workout that I do is one of his marathon plan workouts. A poster above posted that concept as an example of how complicate this gets. For me, it is pretty simple: do a warm up, do 4 cruise intervals of a mile each, run 8-10 miles, do a second threshold portion, cool down. How hard is that to remember? You really don't even have to tie yourself into what the second tempo portion is. Sometimes I do it as 15:00 at tempo effort. Sometimes I do it as 3-4 cruise intervals of a mile each. Sometimes I change the first tempo portion to 2 x 2 miles instead of 4 x 1 mile. You know what? None of it matters. The underlying concept is the same - get in your long run with a medium amount of tempo work early, and a similar or smaller amount of tempo work late. If you understand the basic concept of tempo efforts, you can make that work in any number of ways and really don't need to memorize anything. Even if you want to literally go by the book, I don't understand how remembering "Warm up, 4 x 1 mile tempo, 8 easy, 15:00 tempo, cool down" is all that challenging.

Knowledge is our friend.

too hot wrote:

The apologists like Smoove will say that Daniels has you run by feel but having charts is contrary to that purpose. Easy, medium hard is all you need as targets in a true effort based system.

I use Daniels and have had some good success with it. However, I'm coming from a long hiatus and arguably any plan would have brought great gains. However, I view the charts as an example of how things should be structured. I agree that having an easy pace range is dumb. I'm in roughly 42:55 10k shape and do my easy runs about 30 seconds slower than the bottom end of that range.

But I think they are useful for someone just starting because while reps are supposed to be quick and short, intervals and tempos flirt with the same line. So someone just trying their first set of intervals have an idea of what to shoot for and can then adjust from there. The tables should be used as a starting point and then paces adjusted for that runner's strengths and how rested they are. Otherwise you're probably going to overdo it and burn out

ukathleticscoach wrote:

It overcomplicates something very straightforward.

Runners train at widely differing paces and achiever similar results.

Malmo mentioned hard and steady paces that's good enough for most marginal gains is f all use if you don't get 90© there.

Most good runners just do Intervals as fast as they can providing in similar times. Why Make something enjoyable info some nerd stats exercise? Retorical question given how many runners are nerds,!

I remember reading about Threashold Intervals in the late 80's, early 90's. Before then most track work was done at significantly faster paces, with longer rest. So instead of doing 12x400 @ 65-67 with 2-3:00 rest, we'd run them at 70-72 with .60. In that workout instead of every rep feeling like it was very hard work, the first 2-3 felt easy then it got progressively more difficult due to the short rest time.

I'm sure others were doing that type of work before Daniels but he really popularized it and put some science to it.

Basically he said it's OK to go to the track and not blaze full bore every rep.

Now I can see how a lot of runners would really get into the weeds worrying about those alphabet paces he has, but then runners do tend to be a nerdy lot and prone to over thinking every aspect of the endeavor.