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One characteristic shared by all successful training programs is that they help runners avoid randomness and instead focus on sensible progression and consistency. It’s always easy to be tempted by a race or hero workout that may garner more Strava kudos but chasing this type of short-term ego gratification compromises long term success and achievement. If you’re serious about exploring … Read More

For every workout (and most races) during the season there is an ideal target effort level that balances the stress of the workload with an athlete’s ability to recover and benefit from the work. The fastest progress to peak fitness comes from knowing what that target is for each workout and exercising the focus and ego control required to stick … Read More

It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole on any topic related to training physiology and get completely lost in the weeds of minutia. I’ve spent too much time this week, for example, researching VLamax (Anaerobic capacity), it’s relevance to endurance sports and how to train to increase or decrease this metric. It was a good time to come across … Read More

The purpose of training is not to minimize suffering during races. In fact, We train to maximize suffering. We train our bodies to make them able to tolerate more stress on race day: higher heart rates, lower blood sugar, increased muscle damage, lower pH, greater oxygen uptake, dehydration, elevated core temperature, hyperventilation. We also need to train our brains to allow … Read More

I think we’ve all realized, with some disappointment, that Nike’s Breaking2 project will be based on attempting to break the 2:00:00 marathon barrier by also breaking the rules (illegal shoes, illegal pacing, draft car)…but nonetheless a recent article from Wired magazine on the project has some interesting insights into the training of one of Breaking2 athletes, Eliud Kipchoge. Kipchoge won gold … Read More

The retrospective analyses of athletic careers I’ve reviewed here seem to suggest that the Polarized training model, consisting of a large amount of low intensity training peppered with small doses of high intensity, might be the preferred intensity distribution for endurance athletes. Of course, the fact that many top endurance athletes seem to have followed a Polarized model does not … Read More

The what, when and why of every single training session in your program should be clear to you. What The “what” is simply the detail of the workout to be performed…the paces, heart rates, effort levels, duration, rest intervals etc. There are unlimited combinations of these variables that can be remixed into workouts. Through experience and experiment we know the … Read More

Let’s look at a couple of papers this week that further stress the importance of high volume low intensity exercise for endurance athletes, as well as highlight the responsibility of the research subject (you!) to follow the protocol for best results. I’ll dig a little deeper into properly controlled experimental studies in due course, but for now we’ll look at … Read More

As we all know, elite cross country skiiers tend to be lazy, unfit slobs and as such, the training data of Bente Skari presented in the last Almanac post may not be applicable to runners… So let’s take a quick look at the intensity distribution of a pretty legit athlete, runner Ingrid Kristiansen of Norway during her 1986 season.  That … Read More

To illustrate some of the concepts presented recently, let’s look at a great example of the power of record keeping, a methodological scientific approach to training and the possible value in n=1 reports. This slide from one of Stephen Seiler’s excellent review presentations on Periodized Training shows the training data over the entire career of Bente Skari, one of the … Read More