Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

Super interesting thread, really appreciate all the sharing from sirpoc/jiggy/shirtboy/et al!

How would you recommend fitting the 25% of “hard” work for someone doing 5 hours/week on 5 days running? 2 workouts/week with 8k of work each vs 3/week with 6k of work each? Slightly more volume of work with 3/week, but then that leaves only 1 easy and 1 easy/long day per week

I’m ultimately looking to build total volume and add a 6th day, but taking it really slow so 5hr/week is where I’m at right now (injury prone, often when I start adding higher intensity hills/vo2 work, hence my interest in the thread)

You could do 2 or 3 workouts

Q1, E, Q2, Off, E, Q3, Off

or if you did 2 bigger volume days

Q1, E, E, Off Q2, E, Off

Or

Thres, E, Off, Thres, E, Long progression, Off

They are not. This is false statement by you. What he does slower than marathon pace is his long specific runs...

Jiggymeister, thanks for sharing all that info! It’s interesting to see what other runners in the same fitness range are doing and what their results are. I think your recent lactate test and 5K session suggest good things to come! I notice you fall off a bit in the longer distances though. Do you think that’s from the training you were doing previously, just different race conditions, being more of a “short distance” distance runner?

Shirtboy, I have those lecture slides I believe you’re referring to but he doesn’t provide any formulas in them, just two graphs. One plots training stress, using points, as a function of %vVO2Max. The other plots the percent you recover from an interval as a function of time. Both are indeed non-linear (exponential and logarithmic, approximately, respectively).

I’ve referenced this before, but Daniels has a point system in his second edition. Same as Tinman, if you plot the training stress as %VO2Max, you see an exponential relationship. Daniels has a lot of really insightful information beyond E, M, T, I, and R pace. I was thinking to create a document with all the “technical” aspects (equations, charts, tables, analytical methods examples) of what we have been talking about, but wasn’t sure if that would be of interest?

Similarly, since TSS and CTL seem to be popular amongst the group. I did create an equivalent plot/equation as the one Tinman and Daniels have, to compare. Again, it plots the training stress (points per minute) as a function of the Intensity Factor you are running at. I found that while the TSS is not linear, it doesn’t have quite an exponential form either. So, as you progress from slower to faster speeds, the stress value it is assigning doesn’t increase as rapidly as with Daniels’ and Tinman’s model.

Just some more fun with data I thought the group may find interesting haha

Definitely the same lecture then!

Id be interested in what you came up with! Im sure Sirpoc would be as well

I tried to derive some function from the graphs, but im not that great with that type of math. All ive really been looking at lately is TSS from cycling, so i wasnt totally able to make the equation from what Tom was saying to what he was calculating. What he said certainly made sense from a practical standpoint in the lectures, just wish i had a function to go along with it!

The % of Vo2max seems to make the most sense in running and like you said, VO2 max and HR are trending up, but VO2 is certainly an exponential function. Just never have seen a good function that you could tie back to training stress.

So you do minutes with the stress factoring? Makes sense

Good post and agree with your comments re volume.

I have been doing this training for 5 weeks now, very similar to spoc schedule but on 6 days. It's the longest stretch in a long time where I haven't missed a workout due to niggles or lack of motivation. I have been doing around 80km per week, which is less than some higher weeks I had before (up to around 95km) but on a significantly more consistent and sustainable basis.

Once I do a few races I'd be happy to post progress in here.

Can anyone interpret KI's latest session on Strava? Looks like some kind of progression workout?

Why not. However, it is cycling and also not the training form sirpoc described.

Context: around 8h/week endurance training, 2xQ/week (total 90-120min,
10-20min intervals); all Q sessions in the range of 2.5 - 3.0mmol/L -> basically zero improvement

ibb.co

Lactate-tests-lexel

Image Lactate-tests-lexel hosted in ImgBB

Link:ibb.co/fxgKQ11

You're most welcome.

I think it is a combination of not running enough mileage prior to the longer stuff, and not enough threshold work.

That, and being an ex obese (I peaked at 105 kg at 183 cm height), makes me more willing to suffer on the shorter distances such as the 5K. I'm around 70-72 kg now, but I still never feel light enough for distances such as the HM. I don't carry much body fat, but the distribution of said fat is not ideal.

I am currently training for a HM in mid October in Europe, so much better racing conditions. Let's see what happens (If this thread keeps going for 8 more weeks or so :D)

My typical week is 3x Threshold, two longest session (5x6 min, 3x10 etc) and one shortest 6x1k or 15x400 etc. I add one steady long run and a one easy jog. 2 days off. I run sub16 5k on this (15:30 is my pb on highest mileage). Its fun schedule, i can pretty much everyday run quite hard, and i feel fresh. Could i continue this schedule or should change something, what u think? Run 35-40 mpw

As shirtboy said, I would be very interested in something like this. The problem with TSS for the vo2 max sessions (without the power meter) is they aren't weighted. HR is just useless for those reps anyway but pace I'm guessing must be calculated in a linear fashion? It's past my understanding. Despite my posts I'm very much not mathamatic or scientific in my background. The good thing about sessions on the bike back in the day for me was you could account for the harder work better due to normalised power. Yes, you would get some weird anomalies, in the sense that there was some NP buster sessions , that didn't make sense (you could score over 100tss per hour) but as I said before, over the long term looking at 6-12 months training, I made really good use of it to index it to performance. This is an area I've also seen Coggan trigger many people or be triggered by Coggan on the old forums I was on.

I saw this. It's hard with KI lately. Now and again he does something you aren't expecting as he is usually so consistent. I noticed he basically did 6x1600 way above his usual intensity. It was on the road it looked like or off the track anyway, so didn't share his lactate unfortunately. But you can see from his HR for the reps it's way above threshold. Maybe he's been reading this thread because I've been talking about 6x1600 a lot ha ha and I've never seen him do that before. One thing I will say, I've seen him do random sessions before, like one week he did 1x10k steady for no real apparent reason. I thought maybe he had a 10k coming up soon and was throwing out a 95% effort or something. He tricks you into thinking he's changing the whole thing up then he's back to 3-4x3k or 5-6x2k for weeks on end. Maybe he's been doing it so long now, sometimes he just wants to mix it up as it can be really mundane. I sometimes get that feeling.

Seems fine to me if you aren't ruined, but I'm not sure about the value of the steady.. As I said before, I'm aiming for 25% of my weekly minutes to be sub threshold. The rest easy. That seems to roughly scale down on say 40mpw with the shorter seesion you listed to compliment the two longer sessions. I'm guessing on 40 that the long run is pretty long? I would turn that into an easy long. Add in another easy for 6 days if you can , then you probably wont be far off and you can slowly up it.

I started off with less hours/ mileage and 10x3 was my shorter session, that has now become 10x1k for about an extra 5-6 minutes. I made that bigger by increasing my overall hours a week, then with the 25% in mind proportionally adding on 5 mins of sun threshold time when I've added on 15 mins more easy time across the week. Exactly the same , 5x6 became 5x2k, again for around an extra 5-6 mins. In the end, like any system, you'll need to do something to get fitter. But I feel with this you can just slowly up it. Again, KI Strava is great if you have time. Have a look back right to the start and how he's really slowly added on just a few minutes here and there weekly , slowly. This is where (I'm sure everyone is bored of this) CTL is great. As again, if you keep all your zone metrics updated, you can see when your CTL is stopping to increase - or at least flattening off, and then you can look at where or how you can up it ever so slightly. This is where my experience at training like this helps, I'm confident in following that - knowing it will work over years and years outside of running. There will be a point I literally don't have time to increase load anymore, I'm probably close to being there, which is where the PBs will stop and I'll have to have a rethink.

Good luck on your HM jiggy. Thanks for sharing your data found it very interesting. Was really good to go alongside all the super detail sirpoc has put into this thread. It's been great when shirtboy and Hard2find have jumped in with some good science stuff as well. As others say, hof thread. Shame about JS popping up. But what can you do? It's clear he's out of his depth here so let I'm continue to post , he is only embarrassing himself repeating same thing over and over like parrot.

I think sirpoc said he is doing a 10 miler around when you are doing your half. Will be good to see how you both go actually. I hope this thread will continue to be updated. 10 miler in my experience is very similar training needs to the HM, more so than the 10k. But I know other feel different. You both without collaboration probably are more similar than different with your trainings, especially when it comes to the lactate I think you both will are training at for your workouts.

Thanks, I need all the luck I can get :D

I did a 2 x (3K, 2K ) on the mill yesterday.

Avg paces & HR:

- 3K @ 4:09/km & 74.3% of Max HR, failed lactate reading.

Recovery 1:24.3

- 2K @ 4:04/km & 76.4% of Max HR.

Recovery 1:01.2

- 3K @ 4:07/km & 78.3% of Max HR, Lactate = 1.7 mmol/L.

Recovery 1:16.0

- 2K @ 3:59/km & 80.8% of Max HR.

Peak HR during the session = 84.2% of Max HR.

Looking back at my log for the previous weeks, I did forget one detail in my summary from the other day. At the end 5 or so of the sub threshold sessions after the first LT test, I would do something like 4x200m with 200m jog. Those were run around 3:20/km pace.

I don't think they made a big difference, but I had to make it clear that there was some running faster than threshold. It wasn't much and it was not recent (i.e. last few weeks), but it was there. I also do strides ( 4 x 10" ) at the end of one or two easy runs per week, typically the day before a workout.

All the best to sirpoc with his 10 miler. I love that distance, as I reckon I could finish one in an under hour. I've grown to dislike racing events that last longer.

Others may have responded already but no, because these adaptations are occuring between LT1 and LT2. You need to be training at an intensity where blood lactate concentration is increasing. Sub-LT1 training is physiologically very different, it may not even be on the same continuum. It does not produce the "most bang for the buck" adaptations that this sweet spot/controlled zone 2 training does and what we are looking for.

I’m not sure what lactate meter Jiggy is using but it seems like his intervals at around 4:00 - 4:10 pace would be right above LT1. I can’t remember off the top of my head but one of the meters reads 0.5 lower than the other, so Jiggy’s 1.7 reading from the nostril event post would be like 2.2 or eight above LT1. Which is more to the point of my post.

Can training at or just above LT1 illicit a similar training response to training just below LT2?

Anon1, we may be getting terms mixed-up but I don’t think this thread is talking about Z2. My understanding of Z2 is that it is the zone right below LT1. This thread is talking more about the zone below LT2.

I'm actually looking forward to my 10 miler. I don't intend to change the training. It would be too late to now anyway .Will be interesting to see how I go. There's guys in my local park run I've spoken to, who went sub 1 hour for the local 10 mile (great south run for anyone in the UK) who have only barely broken 18 or 18 dead for my local 5k around the time they did the 10 miler. So I'll be a little disappointed if I don't go sub 1 hour. That's the target anyway.

For what it's worth, when competitive on the time Trialling scene, I never ever changed my training no matter what the distance . This is despite competing in both 10, 25 and 50s. Roughly the equivalent of 5k, 10k and HM in terms of time/duration. I seemed to be pretty equal at all distances, despite most of my training near my peak being stuff like 3x15 or 20 sweetspot. This would probably be in terms of running, around half to marathon pace, looking back at HR curves and plots etc. The obvious advantage on the bike is the lesser impact, so you can get away with doing slightly more. I know some people have reported lower HR on the bike, but my max HR and LTHR are almost identical .