Modifying the Norwegian approach to lower mileage

For those that have been having success with this method (or honestly any method), How did you handle building overall mileage and sub-t mileage? And if you stopped increasing the volume at some point, how did you know when to do that?

I think it is still early for me to decide whether I have been absolute success since I haven't raced outdoors in proper conditions yet, but training metrics have been definitely improving, so I'll share my anecdote:

I handled the overall weekly mileage by not increasing it more than 10% per week. As for the sub-T mileage, I was doing one workout only and capping it at 10% of weekly mileage, so 8 km if I was running 80 km/w. After I settled and adapted to 100 km/w which was my target for this summer, I added the second workout. The second workout was initially lower than 10% of weekly mileage and I slowly build up to reach the 10% figure.

As cliché as it my sound, your body should tell you when to add/stop.

As usual, the cliche is exactly right, but hides all the nuance of reality.

So how did you decide on 100km? Isn't there a part of you that says, hey it wouldn't be that hard to squeeze in an extra 5-10km across the week?

As this thread sort of fades away...here is a link that may be of interest to those doing this method. Maybe the best summary of the philosophy of the "Norwegian method" of threshold training I have seen.

teamakerdahlie.com

You are training too hard and will never reach your full potential! — Team Aker Dæhlie

Jarle Wermskog

We hope the headline provoked and made your heart beat a little faster. If you have read this far, we strongly recommend that you continue, and join us on a small deep dive into a discussion about training and intensity contr...

Link:www.teamakerdahlie.com/training/you-ar...

I think if training for a mile or 5,000, for most recreational runners your mileage will end up in the 40-50 mile range here. The goal would be to hit 3 harder days each week. One of those days could be a race, it could be 200m hills, or if you are looking to run a longer day it could be some uptempo running in a 70-80' run. I like doing easy runs on non-workout/race days of 45-55'. And I'd look to do 5,600-7,000 in sub-T intervals on those 2 workout days. Higher end for lower intensity, longer intervals and vise versa.

When I was training for the marathon/half, I ended up more like 60-70mpw. The specific long run helped, and I'd do uptempo threshold running in there. Like Jiggymeister, I built up the volume of my threshold intervals as I went, though probably ended up more like 5-5.5 miles of work.

Well, the most I've averaged in training blocks for prior races was in the 80 km/w range. Hitting triple digits was an attractive target (metric system perk, I'd have to run 161 km if I was running by miles haha).

To your second question, yes, it wouldn't be that hard to squeeze in extra 5 km (which I have actually done in two separate weeks during the past 5 weeks), but I am being very cautious with the risk-reward aspect of it. I figured that 100 km is already a new territory for me which should be plenty, so why risk it? I'm not a professional runner and my current targets should not require that.

I think it comes back to listening to your body. I know that is probably not the answer you want to hear, but listening to your body is hard and it takes time. Pay attention to how the workout makes you feel in the next couple of days after. Do you feel tired, sore or do your legs just not have any pop? Do you feel great and ready to go again? Are you injured? I think starting with 3-4 miles worth of work and hanging out there for a few weeks would be good. It also depends on your age, how long you've been running and where you want to go. Jakob has allegedly been doing double-thresholds since he was a child. Theoretically, you can do a lot no matter what age you are, but if you can't stay healthy or you can't absorb the training then there isn't any point.

Thanks everybody, I think it's clear that the best you can do is an informed guess-and-check strategy. Maybe the best bet is to shoot for X max weekly volume for a "season" and see how you feel and perform. Then, if that was manageable, and you felt healthy you the shoot for X+10-20% the next season and see what that does?

Yes, that is a reasonably sustainable approach.

Treadmill doesn't count.

@sirpoc - something I'm still trying to wrap my head around is the seeming contradiction with updating your pace zones as you get fitter, as well as mapping CTL -> performance (as you've stated that you know with a higher CTL, you'll be running faster). I haven't fully gotten my brain around some of the maths earlier in the thread though.

If you move from a 17min 5k -> 16 min 5k and update your threshold zones appropriately, am I right in saying 5x2k at a similar relative threshold level would product the same TSS? This makes me feel like you'd end up with the same long term CTL doing the same workouts at the same relative threshold (even though you will be doing all the workouts faster as a 16min 5k runner), but from your statement I would have thought CTL would be higher when you're running 16 vs 17 mins.

I see the guy sirpoc hasn't posted here in a while and this is bumped. I also have question. I follow you on Strava, easy to find via information in this thread so many thanks.

But yesterday I notice you did a much faster workout than usual, I mean really much faster but HR probably still under LTHR until the end rep. Was this a mistake? Have purpose like KI? I look back and it seem very rare you do anything like this.

That was a nice summary article of the training system. It's nice when data and detail are provided and not just generalities. Thanks for sharing!

Good news, bad news.

Bad news first. If you get faster and are running the same workout at the same relative intensity, (i.e. 5*2000m at say 0.95 Intensity Factor) your TSS will actually be lower, since TSS is a function of time and intensity factor. Therefore, your CTL will eventually decrease as well, all else the same. This will be marginal though and it will take a while to appear, as CTL is a 42 day weighted average. You'd notice a change in ATL more prominently, since that's just a 7 day weighted average.

So, if you're chasing CTL (as opposed to performance), you have to either increase the time spent running at the same intensity factor or run the same duration at a higher intensity factor, in order to see an increase long term. The obvious reason that you would want a higher CTL is that it means you're doing more work, relative to your previous training. Like mileage though, there is a component of diminishing return. Meaning, you can keep bumping up your CTL and not necessarily see an improvement in performance, even though you are imposing more stress/load.

Concluding with the good news... you improved your 5K, hypothetically, from 17 minutes to 16 minutes!

You are right, you would just stay the same CTL. Which is why I mention , you might go from 9x1k to 10x1k. Obviously if you stayed at 9x1k forever, and ran it at 15k pace , you would always get the same CTL. In fact, it might even decrease as the time it takes would get faster. But this is where I talk about, gradually increasing over time. So I make a big fitness jump, I need to run faster for the easy run, for the same CTL, but I've gone from easy run being 45 mins, to 50 mins, then 55 mins and now at roughly 60 mins. This will slowly increase your load. Same with the reps. I started off doing 8x1k I'm at 10x1k. My 3x3k has become 3x3200 and so on. I hope that makes sense.

For example , I'm creating TSS now of 460 ish a week, maybe 6 months ago it was 400. Over say a 6 week period, my CTL might increase maybe by 3-4 points. That doesn't sound like much, but over time it really adds up. This I'm my opinion, is why this is so sustainable. I would say on this system and singles, 8+ hours is about the limit.

I can't believe this thread is actually still alive or why anyone is remotely interested in my incredibly boring Strava account 😂.

I've possibly had a fitness breakthrough, hard to tell. I might do a park run next week to find out. I have the Great south run 10 miler coming up in a few weeks.

Basically yesterday , I ran as an experiment to see if you could run to HR on the sub threshold intervals (HR caps are great on the easy runs though, IMO) I've never tried this before tbh, but it's been spoken about here so I thought I would try it. My goal was to never go a over LTHR, I didn't have anything else at all on the screen. Literally just HR. Was quite easy, until you get to the last few reps. Then I totally blew the workout on the last 1k but just thought may as well finish it off at this point, especially as I hadn't raced in a few weeks. This, I think is the problem with running to HR. If I had run to pace, I would have never gone over. Then when I saw the pace, I was actually shocked how quick it was , 3:29 /km average. Maybe other people might have more luck, but I feel I have the paces (for me) worked out nicely to lactate levels so I'm definitely just going to stick to that.

On that note of HR, I find that it is helpful to follow but you can’t really base the pace off it. The problem is that on short (1k or 3 minute) reps you haven’t reached a stable HR by the end. And on the longer 10 minute reps it can take 5+ minutes to level out. So HR is more helpful to track and look at afterwards.

I’ve been doing all workouts on the treadmill to control pace, and I think HR is a useful metric for the load of each session. But it lags too much to be the target for intensity within a rep. It can be useful for adjusting (increasing) speed for the next rep.

My coach was big on HR in college. We also tested blood lactate. At the time, I feel like he was experimenting a lot. Looking at the team now, he really has it dialed in. What seems to work best, if you want to use HR for these workouts, is to progress through the different zones. Start quite a bit slower than threshold, closer to LT1. This could be 10-20s per mile slower than threshold. Maybe more. Then work the pace down. It depends a bit on the length of the rep, but always err on the side of slower. The first rep of the workout your HR might only be at 75% of max. Maybe just under. That’s fine. The next rep, run a little faster. HR will still be low. After a few reps, settle into the 80-85% of max HR range. The bulk of the workout should be here. The last rep you can push the HR up a bit. It might even happen naturally depending on the circumstances of the workout. Play around with it. It’ll take some time to get it right.