Training Discussion Thread - outsiderunner

The guy likes to hammer, that’s his mentality. He’s only doing too much of the most important training for a distance runner - high aerobic/steady state. At his age and mentality, substitute one of these runs for an off day/cross training. One day a bunch of strides after an easy run. So Three days progression runs/two easy runs with strides/one light volume 200-400’s/one day cross-training. Some additional modulation, but not a drastic shift.

Rinse and repeat

Yeah...the assumption that the only reason people don't go hard every day is to avoid injury totally ignores the "stress, recover, super compensate, repeat" paradigm. You then have to assume that the "recovery and compensation" portions are done just within the time between workouts? I don't have a lot of background in low impact competitive cardio events, but it still seems like the stress/recovery cycle should be foundational.

Avoiding injury I can see as a reason why runners are only out there 10-15 hours a week instead of 30, but the modulation of the work seems more fundamental to growth than the max volume or duration of work possible.

(hence, a 75 minute easy run becomes a 4.5 hour easy bike ride)

My intent with the second comment was to say: OR runs harder everyday, most who do so get injured, but because he hasnt gotten injured, maybe it is ok for him to keep doing so.

Admittedly my comment came from a larger knowledge of swimming and lesser knowledge of cycling, it appears you have the opposite. I should not have included cycling in my comment. Also I used the word harder as compared to hard on purpose, I know they don't got 100% everyday, but spend more time at higher %s then runners. I was a fairly serious swimmer and know swimmers from Div 1-2-3 NCAA to OTQers to an Olympic gold medalist. (although this last one is true, I know nothing about her swimming since I quit in 2012 (Rio gold, so 4 years)).

outsiderunner wrote:

RR&T Historian wrote:

He could get a lot of the same benefits from just doing sustained fartlek and alternations for set times, or just taking a few days a week easier so he could take a few days harder. That's where plenty of stress free improvement could come, not from giving him a 2s pace window to hit.

This is an excellent post. I will get to what fascinating has discussed later, but for now could you please give me a specific recommendations for a sustained fartlek and alternations? Could the alternations be done on the road?...on hilly roads? Also, with track stuff, I am a bit of a simpleton when it comes to timed rests...still do not quite get how people can remmber exactly where they left off in a rep. Thus, I use distance-based rests...200, 400, or whatever.

I agree with Historian's suggestion.

In response to your questions, OR:

Simple recipe for sustained fartlek: following a good warmup, alternate running something like 1:00 fast /1:00 easy until you feel like you've gotten a good workout in, then cool down. Approach the first few faster efforts as an extension of the warmup and let yourself build gradually into the workout. Once you get going, you would want to be feeling strong, moving well, letting it fly if you feel good but not flailing or flogging yourself. The easy parts should be easy enough that you feel ready to go again when the time comes. At the end of the run, you should feel like you've put in something like the same level of effort that you would on a good "flyer."

For myself, I might do something like 15 x 1:00 fast/1:00 easy, partly around a park and partly on a bike path.

Simple recipe for alternations: following a good warmup, try to run something like a half mile at what I would call a steady effort (the faster end of easy), then kick it up a couple of gears (to what I would call a "strong" effort) for the next half mile. Bring it back down to that "steady" effort and cruise the next half mile, then kick it up again. Repeat the cruise/surge pattern until you feel like you've gotten a good workout in. Once again, let yourself build gradually into the workout (this is one that can really wreck you if you take it out too hard). The effort on the faster stretches should be similar to what you hit on your "flyers."

For myself, I might do something like 4 x 1k steady/1k strong on a 2k loop around a park.

Both of these workouts can certainly be done on the roads, and both can be done by effort on moderately hilly roads, though on really hilly roads you might be better off doing hill surges in the way that Allen has suggested before. (Basically, changing gears in response to the terrain rather than specific distance or time.) And both workouts can be adjusted/adapted/developed to suit your needs and preferences. So, if you want to use distance-based recovery, use distance-based recovery. Whatever works for you.

If you wanted to incorporate this kind of work into a simple weekly schedule, here's one suggestion about how you might do it. (Just a suggestion, and obviously something that could be altered/adjusted however you see fit.)

Day 1: Easy-to-moderate progression (basically, build up to a nice rhythm but don't hammer it home)

2: Flyer progression (do your thing)

3: Easy-to-moderate progression

4: Fartlek/alternations (one week one, the next week the other)

5: Easy-to-moderate progression

6: Long run (do your thing)

7: Recovery day (if I remember correctly, you typically go with six days a week)

Hope this is helpful!

Gordon Tremeshko wrote:

Yeah...the assumption that the only reason people don't go hard every day is to avoid injury totally ignores the "stress, recover, super compensate, repeat" paradigm. You then have to assume that the "recovery and compensation" portions are done just within the time between workouts? I don't have a lot of background in low impact competitive cardio events, but it still seems like the stress/recovery cycle should be foundational.

Avoiding injury I can see as a reason why runners are only out there 10-15 hours a week instead of 30, but the modulation of the work seems more fundamental to growth than the max volume or duration of work possible.

(hence, a 75 minute easy run becomes a 4.5 hour easy bike ride)

I was not quite the student of swimming as I am of running but I can try to compare the two. I believe that the recovery is quicker in swimming than it is in running, I'm not sure why. If desired I can try to break down the differences both in practice and meets to help understand it.

In general I would say that swim training looks a lot like what Mihaly Igloi was doing for running.

However this is fairly off topic from the original purpose of the thread. My main advice for OR was my first statement, to allow a RRTT poster that he trusts to coach him through a season.

-RunnerSam

I thought swimming can withstand harder training is because of zero impact.

Running really takes it out of you.

OR- alternations would be good for you. enjoy stuff like mile alternations at @ LT / MP. since I think you're a ST guy, you can keep the delta between the "fast" stuff and the slow stuff closer together.

This is the wrong time to make a change, in my opinion. I would wait until after Boston or even better until OR himself desires a change. My advice to OR at that point....train in a classic Lydiard style. Run more mileage over those hills at mixed efforts (easy to steady) and sharpen with primarily anaerobic work for the last 6 weeks or so before the goal race.

too hot 3 wrote:

This is the wrong time to make a change, in my opinion. I would wait until after Boston or even better until OR himself desires a change. My advice to OR at that point....train in a classic Lydiard style. Run more mileage over those hills at mixed efforts (easy to steady) and sharpen with primarily anaerobic work for the last 6 weeks or so before the goal race.

Would that not be a fairly significant change to his training approach?

statfanatic wrote:

Would that not be a fairly significant change to his training approach?

Certainly and it is in line with what I have suggested to him in the past but I respect the fact that he might not want to make a significant change and frankly nor would I at this point.

too hot 3 wrote:

statfanatic wrote:

Would that not be a fairly significant change to his training approach?

Certainly and it is in line with what I have suggested to him in the past but I respect the fact that he might not want to make a significant change and frankly nor would I at this point.

Fair enough. I misread your first post and thought you were saying that would be consistent with his current approach.

What an odd thread. I've never seen a whole thread here devoted to critiquing one person's training. I keep losing track of that RRT thread so I don't know what happened to you there.

But looking at the description of what you're doing I will say that it looks very much like what I did except for your mileage being lower. Doing that got me from a 4:34 marathon to a 2:35. I was much younger than you. And this sort of training was very common in the 70s. We had at least a dozen guys in my club with marathon bests between 2:15 and 2:45 and really all of the ones that I knew of were training along these lines. I kind of patterned what I did from Ron Clarke and it went pretty well for him. Jim Peters did something along this line.

Then it fell out of favor when the physiologists came along. I suppose that because they had letters behind their names people let their ideas trump what many of us had done before and there was this idea that the physiologists knew what constituted the right way to train. But they've never really proven their ideas "correct" by producing better performances. We can't really point to someone today training like Clarke or Bill Adcocks did to evaluate how well that's working because you almost cannot find anyone doing that sort of thing.

Late in my better years some events transpired that got me to thinking I'd been doing it wrong and that I should have easy days and go harder on hard days. At best doing that made no difference in my racing. At worst it may have slowed me. It's hard to say for sure because I was getting older. But many years later, when I got under 3:00 for what I'm pretty sure was the last time, I was back to doing mostly what's now called progression runs, though I had included one session of long hill repeats each week.

You're running really well for your age. I would not change what I was doing until I was convinced it wasn't working. Yes, others may be running even better than you by doing it "right" but that does not mean you'd get the same results. Your training obviously is fine. Theirs also may well be fine. There is no single correct training method and you should not abandon something that's done well for you on other people's say so unless those people are willing to put up big time bucks as a guarantee you'll be much faster doing it their way.

I suspect the "inferior" shorter distance times may be mostly due to a lack of focus on them on your part. That's mostly a guess and probably a bit of projection. All I ever cared about was the marathon and did not race seriously at anything much shorter once I was out of college. In hindsight I probably might have been better suited for those distances than I was for the marathon but will never know. If I had wanted to focus on those distances I likely would have done things a little bit differently but not very much. There was still the Ron Clarke example.

Great post HRE. I think part of the mystique of this thread comes from the fact that Outside Runner has constantly asked for advice and feedback so many times and, to the best of my understanding, never really implements it.

I agree that winter in particular could be a tough time to make major changes. For me in the Northeast, it’s harder to get in workouts that are faster than tempo pace. And, by conventional wisdom, Boston training would probably start sometime in January.

Stonecutter is right too. It’s a tough call. And, at the end of the day, OR is going to do whatever he feels like (which seems to be progression every day).

It sounds like Outside Runner is considering participating in a series of a half dozen or so winter 5k-8k races. This could really help with “speedwork”.

Reminds me of old school guys who would train as HRE describes and then also race frequently.

outsiderunner wrote:

Quickly...to the thoughtful poster who offered the 5:00 time cut guarantee, I say my answer is: yes. Black hole may think he is completely right about me, that I am mostly just fixated on myself and on getting attention, but he is wrong on that. Dead wrong. I want to run fast. I do not, though, want to stress over it or have it become too mechanical. But right now, I am more open to other ideas than ever.

If it is true that having defined workout days with prescribed paces would stress you out or make you worry about them days in advance, then you shouldn’t jump right into them - it would probably just become a self-fulfilling cycle where you were over-stressed mentally, underperformed, and then took that as proof that the training doesn’t work [thsi creates more stress; repeat].

I agree with the others who suggested a more gradual change, especially leading up to a spring marathon. I also agree with the small changes being, in order of importance:

1) Add a couple of true easy days each week

2) increase mileage around 10-15% for this block compared to the last

3) add some fartleks/alterations on one or two days per week to supplement your progression run “workouts.” Don’t cut the long run though, and feel free to fly away on these.

4) add 4-10 hard strides or hill reps at the end of a run about once/week

One marathon cycle of this could be a good way to bridge the gap to trusting a coach and doing workouts. If you go for a fall marathon after that, you should just let Stone Cutter coach you, if he is willing.

HRE - I vaguely remember reading previously a statement from you that you used to have 26 mile training runs that were faster than your marathon races. Is this true?

I’m currently in hibernation after a soul-searchingly horrible experience in my first serious crack at a half-marathon this fall... hit the 9 mile mark in 45:1x and then death spiraled into a 1:09. So perhaps no one should be listening to my running or training advice at all! Maybe I’ll contribute when I get back going. For now I like to read.

The GF’s training is probably more interesting than mine, because it’s better thought-out, she is a more consistent racer, and her times sort of “have a home” among your thread, with several others in similar boats. But are there any women who contribute? I thought there used to be a regular poster who was a fairly accomplished woman, but it doesn’t look like she’s still around.

But for context, The Girl keeps her training only in a nearly-illegible, hand-written notebook. I can’t even get her to wear a GPS watch, so I’m not sure a semi-anonymous internet message board is the best step into the modern age of record keeping.

[sorry for distracting from the OR focus here]

No problem...post as much as you wish, as I am fascinated by you...and your girlfriend. She sounds like quite a beast (I am sure you know how I mean that). Both you and GFMAH have made excellent suggestions. I really like them. Glad that both of you laid out a simple structure that would seem to suit me and my running, and GFMAH even breaks it down day-by-day.

Regarding coaching...Stone is at the top of my list...no doubt.

HRE - Thanks for making an appearance here, and for you input. I have always looked well upon your contributions to this forum. Thers is so much “history” in your running, and it is great to hear your first-hand accounts of what when on back then in that golden age. I had figured that lots of guys hammered hard pretty regularly in those days. I certainly did not invent the “flyer.”

All the best to you...

RR&T Historian wrote:

HRE - I vaguely remember reading previously a statement from you that you used to have 26 mile training runs that were faster than your marathon races. Is this true?

Oh no. Only once did I do that. My typical long run was 17-20 miles but it was usually around my marathon pace or slightly faster once I got warmed up.

outsiderunner wrote:

HRE -

All the best to you...

And to you as well.