Will slow 2-a-days for higher mileage be beneficial?

Want to get better? Run 13x per week. Twice a day 6 days, once on Sunday 18-20 miles minimum. Run it all slowly at first, the pace will drop as you get fitter. Keep doing the 80 miles you’re doing now as one session, add 3-5 miles of easy running for your second session. Improvement guaranteed if you can do this without injuring yourself.

Kenyans do that, other professionals do that, maybe 7:30 pace but these guys are running 20 min faster

Go for it

Yes, absolutely.

I would recommend even slower (based on what you are feeling).

An 8min mile can be way too hard (day after a hard long run in the midst of a hard training week) or it can be too easy (3 mile shake out the day before your goal race when you are rested and peaked).

Listen to your body! Running a little slower on your easy runs isn't going to hurt you, EVER! The risk of grinding your easy days into "moderate" is too much fatigue and crappy results in your hard workouts. The goal of training should be to nail your hard workouts and let your easy days be truly easy.

I'm a huge believer in "polarized" training. Avoid moderate efforts whenever possible.

Pro tip: Run your base miles real slow...but add 3-4 couple fast strides or bound or skips at the end of your easy workout to maintain a little pep. This maintains your neural recruitment with a minimum of systemic fatigue. A easy run with a couple real fast strides is a much better "recovery" workout than grinding it out at a moderate effort.

Easy or HARD I say. Never moderate.

I agree with this one mostly, make your easy days easy and your hard days hard. Is there ever a place for medium pace? I dunno. If your marathon pace is at that medium pace then it's good to do some tempo runs at race pace.

Regarding doubles, go for it. You don't have to double every day, even if you take a day completely off. Jared Ward does that and he is great. If you are going to double on a workout day, make sure the harder workout is the morning run, and for the evening run just run easy pace recovery miles.

You will be surprised how quickly your mountain of laundry grows when you start doubles!

I used to do that in my youth when I was obsessed with just doing the miles, rather than focusing on results. Once I dropped back to one quality run per day (or less) my times improved a lot because I wasn't as tired/injured. I don't remember who said this but it was one of the greats: "if you're running twice a day you're wasting one of your runs."

Strong disagree with ilonggo. Strong agree with xcskier.

To OP, “junk miles” are one of the most misunderstood concepts in running. Junk miles are exactly the moderate intensity efforts that xcskier describes: too slow to have benefit, but too fast to recover properly, making the athlete feel flat all the time, and underperform in races.

Junk miles are NOT easy miles. Accumulate as many easy miles as possible up to your injury limits.

There is nothing beneficial happening at 6:00 per mile that is not happening at 7:50 per mile.

The slower pace is providing all the metabolic adaptations with lower risk.

Check out the Strava training of Jo Fukuda. Runs a ton of 9:00 or 8:00 miles in doubles, a few hard workouts, and 2:10 marathon.

positive k wrote:

Check out the Strava training of Jo Fukuda. Runs a ton of 9:00 or 8:00 miles in doubles, a few hard workouts, and 2:10 marathon.

I looked his strava up and it doesn't really seem like that.

His last week:

115 miles

31st: 15 mi @ 7:11 pace

1st: AM: 13 mi @ 6:59 pace

.......PM: 5 x 2K @ 4:43 pace

2nd: 14 mi @ 7:23 pace

3rd: 18.5 mi @ 5:35 pace

4th: 9.2 mi @ 6:32 pace (8500ft altitude)

5th: Farlek 2 min, 1 min, avg ~4:42 pace

6th: 13 mi @ 6:55 pace

Maybe other weeks are different, but this was last week. Looks like he trains pretty standard with relatively normal paces, just high volume and he's strong / quick. His warm ups and cool downs look pretty slow 9:00-10:00 / pace though.

Interesting on Fukuda...my description is what I remembered him doing around a year ago:

huge miles--like 150-180 mpw

at super slow paces, 8-10 minutes per mile

normal "fast" workouts.

Maybe he changed his plan!

Also that more "normal" week you posted was his last update, from early June, maybe he got injured doing it???

positive k wrote:

Strong disagree with ilonggo. Strong agree with xcskier.

To OP, “junk miles” are one of the most misunderstood concepts in running. Junk miles are exactly the moderate intensity efforts that xcskier describes: too slow to have benefit, but too fast to recover properly, making the athlete feel flat all the time, and underperform in races.

Junk miles are NOT easy miles. Accumulate as many easy miles as possible up to your injury limits.

There is nothing beneficial happening at 6:00 per mile that is not happening at 7:50 per mile.

The slower pace is providing all the metabolic adaptations with lower risk.

Check out the Strava training of Jo Fukuda. Runs a ton of 9:00 or 8:00 miles in doubles, a few hard workouts, and 2:10 marathon.

This...

I've had to slow down my EZ runs to 9-9:30 at the start of the year, around February, but as I become fitter, with the same effort, they have improved down to 8:50-ish. But unlike 2019, I'm not hammering everything at 8:15-8:20 in the gray moderate zone and feeling dead all the time, plus I'm able to run 55-60 mpw now easily vs. struggling at 35-40, and my LRs and tempos aren't killing me the day after with regards to recovery.

EZ days EZ is a golden rule of running!

OP, yes, I think some doubles, even if you think they are "slow" will benefit you. You don't have to double every day, but 3-4 doubles per week ought to be doable based on what you've described so far. I've found that a decent way to incorporate doubles is to phase them in by simply running the same number of minutes that you would have done in one run, but split into two runs (just to get your body/mind used to running twice a day) and transitioning to the point where each double day consists of running for ~20 minutes more than you would have done in a single run (example: If you would have done a 70 minute run, then your double would consist of two runs that total ~90 minutes, such as 30 min in the morning and 60 in the afternoon).

As for the debate that has popped up in other posts about moderate paced running, I think it is important to remember that not all non-hard-workout days are created equal. You might have a couple days between hard efforts, so it might make sense to make one of them quite slow (true recovery pace) and the other more of an "easy effot" sort of run. There's also definitely space in a lot of running programs to make some of the "workout" days into some "moderate" efforts, like a steady medium long run or a progression run. My point is that not every day and run needs to be the same, and hitting a variety of paces, from slow recovery joggin' to all-out sprints, it totally appropriate.

We are getting into semantics here but... a long "moderate" effort is HARD.

Running 9 miles at "moderate" marathon pace...easy. Everyone should be able to do it, anywhere in the training cycle. This is a pretty worthless workout though. No real training stimulus but tons of pounding on the legs. The cost benefit is strongly negative.

Running 18 miles at "moderate" marathon pace...hard, especially in the midst of hard training cycle. This can be a really beneficial workout for marathoners (assuming you take the days before and after truly easy). It almost might be too hard for us mortals who have a history of injury, poor aerobic development and/or grind up into efforts that are above our bodies limits.

TLDR: Look at the cummulative fatigue in a workout to determine its impact on the body. A "moderate" effort can be hard work out, you just need a lot of moderate.

If you are saying that running under 18 or even 10 miles at marathon pace is pointless then you couldn’t be more wrong.

Yessiree Bob wrote:

Want to get better? Run 13x per week. Twice a day 6 days, once on Sunday 18-20 miles minimum. Run it all slowly at first, the pace will drop as you get fitter. Keep doing the 80 miles you’re doing now as one session, add 3-5 miles of easy running for your second session. Improvement guaranteed if you can do this without injuring yourself.

Some great advice on this thread, and I agree with this. But, I think a day off helps more than it hurts. So do the long run Sat, maybe double back in the evening, but take Sunday completely off. That 36-48 hours of recovery does wonders for the body, especially if you walk/swim in the pool and/or get a massage on Sunday.

A hybrid plan based on some of the other advice here would be Tu and Thurs harder, every other day easy, and the long run can be the “moderate” run, progression style.