Volunteers needed to test my Low Mileage, High Quality training plan!

Haha. So your 'low mileage, high quality plan' is actually a 'do this for a little while but for actual long term improvements you're going to have to forgo this low mileage stuff'.

Got it.

logicalman wrote:

What you're essentially saying (though not outright, seemingly) is that your plan IS NOT actually a low mileage plan for long term improvement. It's a plan to get you to higher mileage and the resulting long term improvement.

A bit deceptive as any one already able to handle high mileage with high quality would actually regress doing a plan like this.

You are almost right. There are two ways to add stressors: increase intensity or mileage. Some people add mileage first, then intensity. Some people add intensity, then mileage. Others do both at the same time. This plan focuses on increasing intensity while holding mileage steady before increasing mileage to an extent. On the other hand, as one gets faster at the 60 minute run, one does increase mileage.

If someone believes he or she will regress by doing this plan because that person is already doing high volume and high intensity and has remained injury free for many years and is seeing the results they want to see, then that person may wish to continue as they are. If that person kept mileage the same, but used the quality days here, they actually might get faster, but it is possible that they could stay the same or regress. If that athlete was willing to test the plan to find out, I'd be fine with that as long as the athlete would be okay with whatever the outcome it.

I do not want to deceive anyone. If someone doesn't trust this plan or me, then they should act according to their conscience and I will act according to mine.

I'm starting to realize that logicman might be the same poster who I said I would not respond to and I will not respond to this logicman anymore. There are too many disrespectful ways of communicating in logicman's postings.

I'd like to find out how far this plan can be taken. I'd like to see how fast someone can get before plateauing. Experimentation is for the curious. Not for the close-minded. The close-minded already know everything and have no reason for curiosity or experimentation.

Two of your sessions all out each week will not result in chronic fatigue.

caiado wrote:

Two of your sessions all out each week will not result in chronic fatigue.

Then, for you, you would do them all out.

Please don't misunderstand when I wrote, "be unafraid to take 1-4 days off the rest of the week." A person can run whatever they are accustomed to running. Of course, the more days a person runs, the more likely they are to not recover and to start accumulating this or that nagging injury. I run 5 days a week, but if I wanted to take more days off or if my work situation made it so I couldn't run for three days, that'd be okay as long as I kept the quality days in place.

How fast do you think a runner with talent could get on this plan, running 20 miles or less per week?

I just read this thread and wanted to voice my support for this plan.

I've had a way of training which echoes a lot of this for many years, in a much fuzzier manner. I think you've captured 4 key things about training:

1. 6 week blocks are good. Lots of coaches have done things this way. In practice I have gone for 'roughly six weeks', picking an upcoming major race, vacation, Christmas or (more recently) business trip a few weeks ahead, figuring that week is going to get disrupted anyway, and making that a "stop and assess" period.

Repeating a session fairly often - e.g. 3 weeks later - and having one or two major goals for each block are both very good psychology.

2. 2 quality sessions a week is ideal for a LOT of people. We always used to do 3 hard ones when I was young, going hard again just before we'd fully recovered from the previous session. Now I'm a master I decided to shoot for 2 sessions, and was very busy with work so just plodded to work and back on the other days. Result: amazing, consistent, week-by-week improvement over months, resulting in getting (briefly) to the top of the age group rankings in my country. And I also read of a lot of good elite youngsters and their coaches doing the same. It's just basic sense to wait until you are recovered, then wait another day to be sure, and arguably that's when you get the supercompensation!

3. Variety of paces is really, really good. I was raised on the 5-pace system and it works. Regular running at good speeds makes you more efficient, takes out the kinks and strengthens all the running muscles. I fully agree that postcollegiate runners get slower because they never try to run faster than 5k pace, or only do so for a few brief weeks in summer. I recently read Charlie Spedding's book and even as a marathon runner, he reckoned he needed 10x200 or 10x400 in the winter to get near peak 10k/marathon fitness.

Where I (and many I know) differ is having a bit more of an annual cycle. In the miserable, rainy UK, it's natural to avoid the track more and do longer work in winter, then follow this kind of schedule in spring. On the other hand, hills are available all year round in all lengths, so one can achieve similar goals.

I'm not aiming for low mileage myself, but equally I wouldn't want it so high that the times for those sessions weren't respectable.

I would also suggest one other "trick" for people unsure exactly what to focus on. It's perfectly possible to mix a lot of paces with a 'descending distance' session like 2000-1000-800-600-400-200 or 7-4-3-2-1-0.5 min, ticking a lot of boxes in one go. My coach sets these every couple of weeks in winter. That way you can get a little bit of 'speed maintenance' each week in a period when you are mostly concentrating on longer distances.

Question: what do you do in your warmups? Do you have regular strides in there, or do you only hit higher speeds when there is a designated faster-paced session?

I feel like you are onto a good idea but your language and your premises are off. Also, define talent.

caiado wrote:

I feel like you are onto a good idea but your language and your premises are off. Also, define talent.

Talent = I won my first two age group XC races in HS. I came in 3rd in my first mile in 8th grade and won my second one by at least 200m (5:38). On almost no training. Also, Jim Spivey had talent. He ran 19:30 in his first race, in the 17s in his second, in the high 16s in his third and in the low 16s in his fourth off of no previous base running. Talent is a natural gift. It is perhaps genetic. My family has talent. I watched one of my older brothers lap other kids in the mile in juniior high and he didn't even like to train and probably slacked in practice. My other brother also excelled in junior high school and went to state in high school and did well. In college he ran under 4:10 in the mile at Drake Relays as a freshman. There seems to be a genetic component since we are in the same family and trained or didn't train in various ways.

Talent is when you excel with very little training. Hummingbirds are talented swoopers and woodpeckers are talented peckers. Their bodies are designed such that they are able to do this or that inherently, before they could even learn how to do it. A baby rhino gets prodded along moments after its birth to move to a new location. It has the talent to move its legs and balance. Humans crawl first so we have less of that talent. It takes us much practice and other development to walk upright.

When I use talent, I am referring to something inborn, raw, undeveloped.

Thank you for complimenting my ideas. I apologize about the confusing language.

wow, buddy, relax a bit, huh? You're the one that said you didn't follow the logic of someone else's post so I tried to explain it to you.

You're going on about black and white when there is no black and white and now you're going on about experimentation when most serious beginners are doing exactly this; meaning it's not a new 'profound' idea or anything, it's just a conservative training model that some may use until they can do full-on training.

no need to get so defensive and throw out all this stuff about 'close-minded' and all.

eurodonkey wrote:

Question: what do you do in your warmups? Do you have regular strides in there, or do you only hit higher speeds when there is a designated faster-paced session?

Thank you for commenting on the good in this plan. I think it is a very British plan with US influences as well.

It is incredibly hot where I live in the summers so I have to get my workouts done in a short amount of time. Because it is hot, I can warm up quickly. If it is 95 or above, I will just run a half mile and will only do strides if I don't feel too hot yet. Because of the heat, in summer my first interval might be much faster than the last. I don't worry about this too much.

Now it is cool here and perfect for running. Now I run 1 mile for my warm up and then I do 4 X 100m strides. I may or may not run 1 mile for a cool down. I generally don't believe in running distance after the muscles are tired because of risk of injury, which is why the cool down is optional. I have been doing strides in the cool season before every quality session except the 60 minute run. It only takes me 4 X 100m to feel loose and fast. If someone wanted to 8-10 strides, that'd be fine.

When I started this thread I wrote that the non-quality days of the week should be easy. I am bending on this now because running at 140-155 bpm has been feeling easy for me. So, I am running some faster speeds on my non-quality days, but still no strides on those days.

This morning I did the hill workout. 1 mile warm up, some strides, 6 X short hill. First one in 41 seconds, last one in 36 seconds. Again, multipaced, naturally. I'm sore already so I will probably skip tomorrow and if I am still sore the next day, I will run easy then, but I haven't run easy for awhile because no workout has made me sore up until now. This is the basic "go hard, then recover" mentality.

I can do this training year round because of where I live. I don't do work on the track unless I want to. I have a watch with a timer that will beep after a set amount of time. With this method, if an athlete knows that he can run the 3 X 1 miles workout at 5:00 pace, then when he goes out to do the 1200m workout, he can set the timer at 3:45. Then, he knows he will be running a little bit more than 1200m, because 1200m is shorter than 1600m, but that's okay. There is something mentally relaxing about doing this training off of a track. Track training is mentally tiring with its exact measure. During track season of course it is more specific training to do this on the track whether it is mentally tiring or not.

How would the aforementioned athlete know he is training faster? Because he starts his 1200m at the same point when going in a particular direction. He'll notice that four weeks ago he only made it to the willow tree, but today he made it to the pothole just beyond the willow tree.

This plan sounds very similar to what you've been doing in season with the exception of keeping the mileage low.

What is your height, weight, age and what distances are you racing in and how fast? How much mileage are you putting in and when?

Is someone who can't crack 60 in a quarter with training but can run 120 mpw without injury talented? Also, you can't just write a workout and have it make sense. 10x400 doesn't mean anything. What pace? what recovery?

What is your height, weight, age and what distances are you racing in and how fast? How much mileage are you putting in and when?

175cm (5'10"), 73kg (should be 71 at summer peak), 44; last summer was 4:15 for 1500 and 15:36 5000m. I was a bit faster in my youth but am now 3 years into a comeback after 15 years of becoming a slightly fatter jogger each year ;-)

Last season I sustained about 60mpw average through the winter, 50 in summer. When I clawed my up through layers of fatigue to get to a consistent 60mpw for the first time in 15 years (about a year ago), the weight dropped off and I started to get fit very fast, but that was also the time when I was doing two good sessions each week, so it's hard to know if it was the sessions, the miles or both. Life is busy now so the target is 70 in the good weeks, and whatever I can in the other ones. But I can run 5 miles to work and the same home on a good day and hardly notice it, so I don't find the mileage itself at all stressful physically.

--

I'm glad to hear you do a lot of it off-road. I think it would be quite stressful mentally doing track reps so often throughout the year, rather than in the run-up to a track season. I always resonated with something Peter Coe said: the track is a sacred place where you to to measure yourself when the time is right.

caiado wrote:

Is someone who can't crack 60 in a quarter with training but can run 120 mpw without injury talented? Also, you can't just write a workout and have it make sense. 10x400 doesn't mean anything. What pace? what recovery?

If that someone is a male during his prime, then, yes, someone who can't crack 60 in the quarter is not a talented 400m racer and probably not a talented miler. If that same person can run 120 mpw without getting injured, he is talented at running 120 mpw without getting injured, which is a talent of sorts. Even though such a person is slow, in my book, it truly is a talent to run such high mileage without getting injured. It takes a certain body type and running form.

What I compare is willpower and talent. Someone who cracks 60 in the quarter has more talent than someone in the quarter who can't. Someone who runs 120 mpw has a lot of willpower. Some people tend to praise others for their commitment, their willpower. In my comments earlier I was focusing more on raw talent than willpower. I'm not big into praising someone for increasing the solitary emotion of courage because I have noticed that it tends to overpower the other emotions and can create a hardness of heart that lacks human tenderness. This is not a blanket statement for all 120 mpw runners by far, bit it is an intrapsychic process that can happen and that I will not praise.

Some people want to be anything but who they really are. They don't have raw talent and they strive to be something that they really aren't. They must ask themselves why they strive to be something else and may even want to seriously consider hanging up the towel. This may often apply to the 120 mpw runner who can't break 60 in the 400m. If the guy is running for fun, then more power to him.

A person does not have to be talented in racing the mile to have dignity. We all are born with dignity. Our talents are unique and some people just need to admit that they are not talented in racing and stop excessively striving. This may have more to do with this plan than at first sight.

Paces and recovery...

Type I workout is self explanatory.

You want to do each workout as fast as you can do the complete workout. This is trial and error.

In general, Type II workouts will be run at 10K down to 5K race pace. Once someone starts getting below 5k race pace in the 3 X 1 mile, they may wish to add a mile to slow themselves down in order to maintain the intended purpose of the workout. It is best to jog a lap or two between these intervals, but not to exceed a 5-minute recovery. Even though this is best, I don't do a jog recovery right now.

Type III workouts will generally be at 3200m race pace. One can begin with 3:00 recovery and work their way down to whatever they can handle. Different patterns can be used to keep it progressive. For example, the 4 X 800 can have 3:00 recovery, the 5 X 600m can have 2:30 recovery, and the 6 X 500m can have 2:00 recovery. Recovery can be dependent on speed. You can run these intervals slightly faster and give more recovery and slightly slower and take less recovery. You'll get faster either way. The recovery here can be a walk or walk jog combination, especially when you are doing 600m and want to get to the same starting point.

Type IV workouts will generally be at 1600m pace or even slightly faster. Even though these workouts are best used to emphasize increasing economy, you can still work on anaerobic conditioning by keeping the recoveries fairly short. For the 6 X 400m, a 1:00 recovery walk may suffice. You don't want to get too flooded with lactic acid before the last interval because you don't want your form to break down, but it is good for the last one to feel like the end of a mile race.

Type V workouts can be done all out. You can take as much rest as you want, but if you systematically reduce the recovery time, I believe you will see your race times improve. At the very least, these workouts develop your finishing kick. These workouts are most likely to cause injury because of the super high intensity. This phase should be skipped for 5k and up racers because the injury risk does not outweight the gains at that distance.

Hills. Start at 4 short hills and work up to 8. They should nto be longer than 150-200m. The first one can be run at what you'd run 10K pace over flat ground and the speed can naturally increase after that. It is beneficial to not turn these into sprints, yet it doesn't hurt if they end up like controlled sprints towards the end. Think about form on these. Think about how your feet are landing and how you are pushing off. Try to keep shoulders relaxed and keep driving of the arms to a minimal.

"Mental Stress" from doing track work is what I was trying to say before when I used the phrase "chronic fatigue." I didn't mean the clinical term so much as that after 12 weeks of speedwork the last thing you want to see is a track.

I'm 5'10-3/4", 87kg and should be 80kg, and age 39. I assume your frame is a little smaller than mine. I'm dropping (fat) weight which is nice. Have you been gettin faster each year of your comeback? Are you on track to beat your PRs at some point?

I'm very appreciative of your 2000-1000-800-600-400-200 workout idea. It had never occurred to me. It is perfect for maintenance and can free up other quality days to do things like 100m strides, fartleks, etc.

Have you looked at Jim Spivey's training logs on this site? They are quite impressive and, I think, inspired by Peter Coe.

I like the quote from Peter Coe you shared. Not only is the track a sacred place, lane one is sacred. I remember in college on the indoor "track" during indoor season, the guys on our team did not feel guilty for literally mowing over a member of the women's team who was going to slow in lane one. Not the best ethics, but signifies a trackhead's attitude towards lane one.

I like something Jim spivey said. Roughly, it was, "You have to believe in your training (program). If you hear that someone else ran 1:45 in practice, that shouldn't make you feel insecure." That's how I feel about this plan. I think the people who have been putting it down, don't really see the patterns in it. They also might not have read Peter Coe's book.

I used to use a much beefier plan, pretty much right out of Coe's book and that eventually led to hamstring problems. I was trying to train like an elite when I wasn't. Now, I've taken the same principles and scaled down the volume. I am not Seb and I shouldn't train exactly like him; just a little differently. Seb is Seb. Only he and a select few can do exactly what he did and reap the benefits.

This program is all high intensity. After eight weeks you will have no where to go.

crybaby wrote:

This program is all high intensity. After eight weeks you will have no where to go.

Thanks for at least voting. I think that I will drop 12 seconds off of my mile time every 6 weeks for the next four 6-week phases. I seem to take .29 seconds per day off of it on average so far.

I love bets (for nothing). Let's see who is right. If I stop getting faster after only 8 weeks, then I will have to adjust my theory. If I continue improving after 8 weeks, you'll need to adjust yours. Otherwise, you and/or I will have to consider ourselves blind dogmatists.

The reason I would say this is not just intensity is because 3 X 1M is very different than 4 X 200m. To run a mile without stopping is not merely intensity. To do it again 3 more times is not merely intensity. To take that mile speed and run fast for 60 minutes is not just intensity. It is intensity plus endurance, albeit light on the long, slow kind of endurance.

Update on my training using this plan. I am in my 6th week, the final week of period 1. I just ran my 60 minute run at a pace that was 55 seconds per mile faster than when I ran it 6 weeks ago and my heart rate was on average 1 bpm lower. This means that my long run is not only being run faster, but an extra mile has inadvertently been added to it by virtue of running faster within the 60 minute window. This improvement is much greater than I had expected.

"crybaby" wrote that I will stop getting faster 8 weeks into the program. In three weeks, I will be starting the 9th week of the program. To me, that is where major improvements can be expected, not where they will stop. We'll see.

From200mTo8k wrote:

Update on my training using this plan. I am in my 6th week, the final week of period 1. I just ran my 60 minute run at a pace that was 55 seconds per mile faster than when I ran it 6 weeks ago and my heart rate was on average 1 bpm lower.

Good work!

Sorry to drop off the map for a while (and to mispost under the wrong handle earlier). I'm going with my traditional approach this winter - lots of easy running and two quality sessions per week through to about Feb (i.e. a traditional base), then transitioning into multi-pace training from March onwards.

Crybaby said that it's all high intensity. I always thought it was wrong to equate pace and intensity. I have another very simple rule of thumb:

- in base period, run each session like you could do the whole session again if you really had to.

- in specific (pre-season) training, run each session so that you could do a couple more reps if you had to

- when peaking, you're allowed to go all out once a week

You can apply any of these rules to any running pace. For example, you can do lots of 200s with 200 jog at 1500 pace without a lot of stress.

Now, if you ran all of those interval sessions really hard, crybaby might have a point. But it sounds like you are smart enough to modulate the effort and your program handles that well. If so, I think it's great to mix all the paces all year round, and suspect it will produce a great result.

Do you have any key races you are aiming for?

eurodonkey,

Be sure to email me when thee time comes, then maybe we can return to this thread. Thanks for saying "Good work!" It is rare for someone on this site to say that without it being sarcastic.

Not bad rules. I used to go crazy hard about 6-10 yrs ago, but now I listen to my body. Since I have de-emphasized will power in my life and in my training, there almost is no such thing as an "all out" session for me anymore, although I have felt nauseous after a last interval on occasion. I mainly try to train smart, not long or hard.

Right now I'm contemplating racing one of three Open meets at a local junior college within walking distance of my home, but that seems kind of random to me and after reviewing my training log, I think it was my randomness that has hurt me in the past. We'll see.

I am training to peak at the end of June, early July for the 1500m in a championship meet. I don't know which meet yet. At first I was thinking I would go in the USATF West Region Master's Championship, but if I am fast enough this year, I might compete against collegiate runners in a last chance meet for my peak race. So far there has been no USATF West Region Open Championship Meet posted, but if one gets posted, and I am fast enough, that definitely would be my primary choice. The only chapionship meet posted in the summer is the US Olympic Trials and my PRs are only good enough to qualify for the women's races so that is out of the question for me.

What are you training to peak for?

I think that even though this plan is used to train for a peak, that if you can get faster in this plan's base phase, like I have, then there really is no peak, but just a constant getting faster. We'll see.

From200mTo8k wrote:

Be sure to email me when thee time comes, then maybe we can return to this thread. Thanks for saying "Good work!" It is rare for someone on this site to say that without it being sarcastic.

You should join the 'Masters weekend runs and races' thread. Precise age is not a constraint. Every week a bunch of people on letsrun manage to be civil and supportive to each other. Who'd have thought it?

What are you training to peak for?

I'm very lucky - the UK has meetings galore. Just generally "the outdoor track season". My local club is still short of a couple of steeplechasers and is in Division 2 British League this season (i.e. one of the top 24 of about 2000 clubs), and despite being a minute slower than in my youth, I still get the call-up. So I get a real buzz out of being on a team, competing with people half my age and trying to hang onto the back of a pack and pick people off where the points really matter. And we have tons of open meetings in May/June/July, literally a couple of choices most weeks. I'm 3 years into a comeback so the next couple of seasons will probably be my best ones as a master.