It can go both ways. I also think it has to dowith what distance your racing, how long you've been doing thisand how healthy are you. Do you train slow then try to build speed or do you build a little speed then add distance then build more speed? I've gone back to running like it was my college XC days again. Run fast, run often and throw on the miles. Guess what? I'm cruising along about 20sec mile faster right now than in Oct. Not for everybody.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

well, you have to define first what intensity means....
heck 60% of max HR is intensity, precisely 60% of the max :-)
Anyhow, this approach is also used by Luc Van Lierde although his coaches (Volkaert and Olbrecht) advocate to have intensity sessions to increase anaerobic capacity (doing efforts of short duration close to max speed with recovery about 1.5 to 2 effort time). The idea is that if you An.Cap is low then you have a lowered perceived exertion which unlike many people think, it is not a good thing as it does not mean you can go faster but only means that you don't notice when you are going too fast.
The same is true (according to them) when adding both a lot of miles with a lot of tempo training...something Olbrecht calls "double whammy"

In any case, you need to figure out what works for you. If I train only on volume with no intensity, I feel crap, legs are stalled and robbed of their strength, it's hard to keep a high turn over rate on the run...not good. including strides, short tempo sessions or sprints, sprints uphill etc...year round always seems to help...

Never have that problem in the water though, but then I suck at swimming so I guess I just don't notice the difference...whether I swim long, short, sprints, tempo etc...always get the same times.

Trying to figure out what works for me -- that's exactly what I'm trying to do. For the last couple of months, I've been slogging through long, slow miles, and all it has done is left me less motivated and less willing to suffer when someone tries to pick up the pace on a group run. My work week training hours are pretty fixed -- I have can usually manage a max of about 90 minutes a day of workout time during the week (but most of the time it's usually around 70). So I'm trying to up the intensity of the work week workouts, then go for the long stuff on the weekends. I think that's a pretty standard program, right?

At any rate, I was going to try and focus on distance for a few months, but all those slow miles drove me nuts. I have found that my swimming responds well to very intense workouts, as does my running. I still haven't found out what works for my cycling yet -- that portion of my training is really lagging behind. I made some good strides in running and swimming last year, but my cycling remained pretty stagnant.

So I'm still tinkering with the plan.

RP