mo'pak wrote:
As a young bloke he was racing mostly on the fells. This sort of work is great for your fitness but doesn't develop your flat speed.
I read the eightlane article on Any Ward but it seems that he is doing very little "specific" paced work, only once every 2 weeks at the most. Other than that, he is saying that he is running most of his training days at a faster steady running pace where he is hitting his threshold. He is attributing this change in focus to threshold/steady running rather than specific workouts as being the reason why he is running faster than ever and why he is running faster than when he was younger.
Here are the quotes from the article:
"Working alongside Tune, however, and Andy notes that, whilst the volume has remained the same, the majority of his training is now done at a quicker pace and specific speed sessions are a less frequent part of the programme.
“The majority of my training is done at my lactate threshold; my training was generally too slow and very inconsistent before. We don’t tend to do much speed work – speed sessions and tempo runs are done about once a fortnight – and in terms of volume it has stayed very similar. But the speed at which I do each run at night is now very different.”"