I agree. What a novice runner (me) thinks is a base is not a base. I am up north so I have 4 more months before is need to get ready for my first race this year. Long and slow for me for a while.

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Dan Kennison

facebook: @triPremierBike
http://www.PremierBike.com
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See, you are the perfect example of someone who doesn't HAVE a base yet ... 2nd year in tri and 9-10 min paces that seem hard. Don't worry much and just run and run some more. Your speed will come with simply running more and longer. Little need for speed work - or just race often and that will be your speed work.

I agree with Rod.

Part of the issue here is we have people all over the map in terms of their back-ground, level of fitness and experience. For this gentleman, not even in the sport two years, his needs are dramatically different than, say a mid level to top AG athlete who hase been training for 10 years and before that was a top AG swimmer.

Like most issues their is a tendency to way over think about what would work for this guy. What special workouts should he be doing? What special program should he be on? It's an over used cliche but more would be more for this gentleman when it comes to running - he should run more. With caution, the 100/100 in the off season would be good for him. Just run. Run as many days/week as you can. It's not special or sexy. It's kinda boring, but it works!! If he does that he will have built a good running base. He'll be running a bit faster and more effciently at the end of the three months.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

you'll note that whether you citing lydiard or the africans, you're looking at 100+ mile running weeks. when i write about triathletes (you guys) and what you should do in the early season, i think there's quite a chasm between 100+ miles afoot and the 12 or 16 miles a week many of you guys are doing.

i don't mind you guys disagreeing with me. nevertheless, i think it's fair to know what you're disagreeing with. it's my view that if you try to be a good runner without building and maintaining base, you'll fail, and you'll probably get injured. second, base is not like a merit badge. you don't check it off as "earned" after 3 or 4 years in the sport, allowing you now to move onto other more advanced training. base always has to be earned, and re-earned, and maintained. you can lose it even inside of a continuous program of running.

third, you ought to take time off, from time to time, and this will make you faster than if you keep training at a constant level all year round. whether you think this is true or not, you probably act as if it is. most of you take time off, because of inclement weather, shorter days, and so forth.

but time off doesn't necessarily mean sitting on the couch. most pro athletes do more running in their winters "off" than most of you do in your summers "on." i think a typical pro routine might be 3 weeks entirely off after ironman hawaii, then the running is sifted back in, fairly quickly growing to 40 miles a week, maintained most of the "off season" winter.

even this 40mi a week afoot won't build the base you need, as a pro, for an ironman. forty a week doesn't include 12 and 16 and 20 mile runs, and you can't hope to run 3:15 (as a woman) or 2:55 (as a man) unless you do these long runs. so, you build base on the run, likewise on the bike.

if you're building after time off, you can't hope to do much bulk mileage if you're not yet very fit, and even more so if you try to throw much quality into the mix. if you try to go the route of quality-first, base and bulk-last, you have no background on which to run that quality. this is not to say that a national caliber runner who's succesfully absorbing 100 and 120 mile weeks should run zero quality during base building, it's that his quality is more likely to be tempo runs at a moderate pace, fartlek, and perhaps a set or two of short-duration strides. during my base building period (as a pure runner) my first "track" workouts were sets of 20 x 120yd in 20sec with 20sec rest, done barefoot, usually, on the grass, end zone to end zone. this is a low-impact workout gets my legs ready to run fast, when the time would come for harder, formal, track work. paul thomas has written here before about closing every workout with an easy set of strides, maybe just a half-dozen @ 100yd long or so, no stress, just to get the legs ready for speed.

each person has to gauge what place he's at. because of some freak injuries/illnesses over the winter, i'm starting at a very low point: extra weight, little fitness. if i try to do any quality right now, tomorrow's workout is going to suffer, and i won't be able to build the base i need. my mission now is to take 4mi daily runs and stretch them to 6mi, then to 8mi, and then i'll be able to, i hope, run the weekly 15-miler, and, voila, in 6 or 8 weeks i'll have somewhat of a base under me, and i'll have the freedom to start moving to some quality work without damaging my ability to recover day over day.

this is not to say that you abandon base work during the part of your training season where you focus on building speed. indeed, if you do abandon base work you'll lose base as you're building speed. it's not that you can't race fast without base, but you risk injury and your fitness will be fragile and suspect at anything longer than a sprint or olympic.

i'm not sure i know what markyv is talking about by moving from the general to the specific, but if he means what i think he means, then i agree with him completely. when you get closer to a race like an ironman, you have to inject quality into your workouts. doing so comes at a high price. intensity costs a lot, and you have to abandon some of the bulk base miles you had been doing. concurrently, tho, you have some rather high quality long rides and runs you must do as the race approaches. how do you fit all that in? this is where it gets tricky, because every workout has a specific purpose when you're 5 or 6 weeks out from an ironman whereas, in a base building period, whether you go out for 2 x 6mi runs or one 10mi run or a 40mi bike and a swim doesn't much matter, because it's all accruing to the base.

my guess is that more of you are like me than are like the kenyan running 100 mile weeks. if you'd like to run that 13.1 miles strong this year; if you'd like to not have IT band problems, and constant strained calves; if you'd like to train hard one day without being totally bushed the next; if running 7mi before work and still having energy to perform work appeals to you; then i'd recommend building a base, most of it at lower heart rates, focusing on increasing the length of your rides and runs, without (for now) increasing the speed of your rides and runs. it's january. start that now, and by march or april you'll have a very nice base, and you'll be a durable athlete with options available to you. if it's too cold to ride, fine, as soon as weather permits, start building your running base.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Here's a workout. Is it a "base" workout, or not?
:-)

RUN
20min w/u
20x[30s FAST at high stride rate, 1min EASY]
10min c/d

I do the 10x20 second on, 40 second off all the time in base training. Short enough to run with reasonable stride length and rate that is identical to (if not more) than my 10K-21K race pace, but short enough that I never go into oxygen debt. I'll often end long runs this way just to remember what it is like to run fast at the end without taxing my body much. I find there is no recovery penalty for this workout, so I can do it year round as part of easy workouts, whether it is off season, in season or as a warmup before a running race.

20x30s = 10min
10x20s = 3min 20s

There's large difference between those two sessions...

Regardless, both can be done during "base" training instead of ingraining LSD neuromuscular patterns....

"ingraining LSD neuromuscular patterns"

can you explain what this means in the context of triathletes who've never in a year averaged more than 12 miles running a week, which i think accurately describes 80% or more of those who call themselves triathletes. keep in mind that liz downing, maybe the greatest runner/cyclist multisport has ever known, averaged 11 miles a week running during one of her best years.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

What was Liz doing for those 11 Miles a week?

We're starting to go in circles a little bit.

I wonder if we could do something similar to what Slowman did in his original post, only divide top calibre IM pros into two camps: those who clearly fall into the classic Mark Allen pyramid camp, and those are clearly "reverse periodization" (yes, I know, no such thing).

Then for each athlete you could go back and calculate

1)Average place increase (or decrease) at Kona
2)Average time increase at Kona
3)Consistency (standard deviation in Kona placement over recent years).
4)Serious injury rate (injuries serious enough to miss Kona - smaller injuries too hard to track).

It'd be pseudo-scientific since you can't even pretend you're controlling all the factors you need to be able to to make any real conclusions, but it might be interesting to see if there's a strong indication one way or the other. Those like Sutton, MarkyV, etc, speak so strongly and confidently about these ideas that you'd think a body of data should be out there to back it up.

The trick would be a proper allocation of athletes into the two camps. Could that be done?

"What was Liz doing for those 11 Miles a week?"

let's talk about that in another thread. my point is that the bulk of triathletes run way fewer running miles than is relevant to many or most of the posts in this thread. so, again, in the context of people who could not run a single 25 or 30 mile week without sustaining injuries, can you talk about the relevance of ingrained LSD neuromuscular patterns?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Liz was running pretty damn hard I'll bet. Anyways....

Rappstar said in this thread "like swimming, running is a skill sport".

If you don't work your skill, you'll never get out of the LSD/injury rut.

"We're starting to go in circles a little bit."

what i hope is that after a hundred posts of circle jerking, we're circling back to relevance. the reason mark allen, dave scott, paula newby fraser, and others were just as fast 20 years ago as athletes are today is that they trained correctly, relying on the historic principles that have proven effective.

it's no different than in running. why were american marathoners faster, up and down the depth list, in the 70s than they were in the 90s? why only now are runners that good again? is it because these athletes have "discovered" kenyan training? how different, in fact, is today's kenyan training from what runners were doing between 1965 and 1985? and americans did it back then in 10oz shoes with no medial posts or ultra light orthotics or roll bars or EVA or "air" or any of that stuff. put today's 6oz shoes on their feet and you might've seen some 2:06s.

what's the difference between kirk pfeiffer, ed mendoza, terry cotton, back then, and deena kastor, and meb keflezighi today? better to focus on what is the same: the coach. bob larsen isn't doing very much different now than he did with his athletes back then, when his junior college team would've been in the top five at NCAA Div I xc nationals. you just do the work, which includes establishing a base early, and building from that base.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

"Liz was running pretty damn hard I'll bet."

she did not run 11 miles a week, as a diet. she had 30 mile weeks. and zero mile weeks, during certain off-season spates, and during sickness or injury. it all averaged to 11 miles over the course of a year.

some athletes -- and liz was one -- did not respond well to high-stress, high-HR work. she spent two or three months a year at my house, every late winter/spring, because portland, oregon was too wet. she did not respond well to speedwork. it broke her down, she was uncomfortable, she didn't come from a HS running background, it wasn't in her DNA. so it was tempo runs for her, mixed in with sub-LT runs. she was never a particularly fast runner. i don't know if she ever broke 35 minutes in a 10k. it's just that she could run 36:45 in her first 10k, ride a blistering 60k, and then run 36:30 for a second 10k. she was more of a rider than a runner, truth be told.

as an aside: we were getting a lot of flack by the bike racing community over dual 650c wheels. so i bought liz a USCF racing license, took her to moriarty, NM, and she set a new women's national 40k record of 54:00. she never raced a bike race again. a bike racing resume consisting of one race, and one national record that stood for some years. i have no doubt she could've brought that down to 52:30 if she tried it a few times. very special lady. very special talent.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

If I look on the 100/100 challenge there are ONLY 213 guys doing an average of 5K per day/35K per week, which equates to barely 20 miles per week. However, there are only 25 guys/gals averaging 70 kpw (10 K per day)~ 40 miles per week. Slowman is right that triathletes on the balance are on fairly low running mileage for what they hope to achieve. 40 miles per week is not a lot, yet we have > 500 people sign up for a so called run focus, yet only 5% are breaking 40 miles per week.

As a point of reference, if you go to any NAS event and average 8:30 miles, this gets you a top ~5% run split and quite often a top 5% overall if you don't swim or ride too slow :-).

WRT to neuromuscular patterns, I think the guy was referring to ingraining the neuro muscular patterns of "'slowness" in that if you never exercise a full range of motion for months on end, it is too much of a shock when you have to go fast.

In his day Mark Allen and Maffetone suggested downhill running on a mild grade to exercise the firing of high stride rate and stride length while being aerobic....I believe 10x20 second on with 40 second cruise achieves pretty well the same thing if you don't have that nice gradual downhill grade.

high-stress, high-HR work breaks pretty much 99% of runners down.

In my workout example, 30s fast intervals are neuromuscular conditioning. They are not all out, nor can you get your HR sufficiently high in 30s to burn you out. Train your legs to move fast and efficiently without chasing mileage.

Add in some threshold running on top of this... and you can get very quick on very little running.. and avoid injury from mileage.

"WRT to neuromuscular patterns, I think the guy was referring to ingraining the neuro muscular patterns of 'slowness' in that if you never exercise a full range of motion for months on end, it is too much of a shock when you have to go fast"

so, again, what do you do with a guy who's never run a 20mi week but 3 times in his whole life? and it's january, and he hasn't run 20mi cumulatively since thanksgiving? what do you do with him? this is the norm, this is the fat of the bell curve in our sport.

let's assume there's nothing physically keeping him from running somewhere between 39min and 44min for a 10k at the tail end of a triathlon. he's reasonably talented. but he's got an extra 10lb as of this day in late january, and his annual weekly running mileage, including off time, recovery time, taper weeks, sickness, illness, is a whopping 6mi per week. what do you want to wager that two-thirds of all readers of this forum have a 52wk average of under 8mi/wk?

so what do you do with this guy? what's his program? give me his program, in broad strokes -- his running miles as a part of his greater multisport regimen -- for the next 90 days. my guess is, it'll look curiously like a routine reinforcing slowness. but swimming is not the only sport where drills and techniques take slow swimmers and make them fast. if you have running talent, i can get the speed out of you relatively quickly. i just can't do it if you don't have a base.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

OK for the ~20 mile per week guy (around 200 people out of 500 on the 100/100 challenge) his program is run 5 times a week for 4 miles and increase that to either 6 times a week 4 miles or 5x5 miles by the end of the month....by the end of month two he is at 30 miles per week and by month three he is a 40 miles per week...all runs maximum aerobic pace....no intervals, no pickups, no long runs yet.

Once he is steady at 40 mpw for a few months add in two days with hills...still uphill easy aerobic, but now he has some downhills to run faster pace but aerobically...drop one run and make another run longer. This should suffice for the next year or two or three or four.

But no one wants to wait :-)....you don't need a lot of speedwork to run 4 min per K off the bike, just endurance and durability!

What's interesting is that 40 mpw in the 80's was low mileage be it triathlete or runner. Now 40 mpw is the top 5 percentile volume age group athlete

Dev

Not @ you Dev just replying to the thread in general.

Part of the problem with the current state of the discussion is that we are bouncing between talking about Professionals as well as mincing those thoughts with the thoughts that are applicable to amateurs. We are not being concise enough.

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
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so.......

presuming A = low mileage guy/gal (under 20 mpw, less than 4 runs per week) and B= medium/high mileage guy/gal with weekly mileage over 20mpw and more than 4 run workouts per week.

A- run frequently and most if not all at a slow pace until you become B
B- introduce speedwork with tempo, intervals, hills, progression runs, etc etc.

seems like common sense to me.

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__________________
JP

my twitter feed

Make B average 30 mpw for 8 weeks and that would make more sense to me. At 20 mpw I would think it would still be more productive to continue to build the base at a comfortable (not slow) pace.

Drills don't make slow swimmers fast.
Swimming fast makes slow swimmers fast.

Running fast makes slow runners fast.

A sample program... with very minimalist mileage:

RUN 1
52.5min As [20min w/u, 15x[30s fast, 1min easy), 10min easy]

RUN 2
20min as [trun off bike as 10x[20s fast, 40s easy], 10min easy]

RUN 3
45min as [20min easy, slowly build pace to fast 20min, 5min easy]

A little less than 2 hours running per week.
Each run has a warmup before quality.. and a cooldown. No LSD here.

EDIT: remember... "fast" is relative

Your program might allow one to fake a sprint tri or an Olympic while slowing down at the end of the run (if you are already fast swim biker) and still finish well....for half Ironman, this will not work. For a flat out 10K to get your fastest time, this will not work. You likely have to forget about your program for marathon or Ironman.

Of course it won't Dev!! That's not the point. Please read Slowman's parameters and his request:

"a guy who's never run a 20mi week but 3 times in his whole life"

"and it's january, and he hasn't run 20mi cumulatively since thanksgiving"

"nothing physically keeping him from running somewhere between 39min and 44min for a 10k at the tail end of a triathlon. he's reasonably talented. but he's got an extra 10lb as of this day in late january, and his annual weekly running mileage, including off time, recovery time, taper weeks, sickness, illness, is a whopping 6mi per week. "

"his running miles as a part of his greater multisport regimen -- for the next 90 days"

OK, we've seen the anecdotal evidence. People have had great success with MarkyV-like training plans. People have had great success with traditional LSD base training plans.

Can someone throw me the names of IM pros whose training plans are centered around Kona, and who fall clearly into one camp or the other? And also, if necessary, the range of years they were in one camp or the other if they've switched. Leave out those with not-well-known, or not-well-defined training philosophies. I want the really fanatical ones, i.e. Sutton's athletes or Allen and disciples. I'll provide data similar to that in Slowman's OP, but instead of just averaging, I'll try to distinctly compare the two camps, and also look at more than just 10th place. I'd also like relatively current athletes (within past 5 years) so we can pretend to control for factors such as improvements in equipment and nutrition - which could easily account for the 6 minutes in the OP.