professional runners and coaches figured this out a long time ago and thanks to training science Guru Professor Steven Siler amongst others who published a review of Elite Training characteristics in the Journal of sports medicine it should be glaringly obvious what you can do to change in your training so that you can run more and become a faster runner because across the hundreds of training diaries that the researchers reviewed they come from the likes of K chog bili Jeffrey muai Stefan Hassan as well as coaches of Jack Dan Arthur liard and Bill Balman to name a
few there was one single training characteristic used by all of the world's best marathon runners it was the same thing one of my clients use to go from the couch to 60 m a week in less than 5 months without any injuries first I want to address a major problem that we as Runners have we always think in absolute numbers when I started running all I thought was 40 minutes for 10K 60k a week 20K long run and 5x 1K under 3 minutes 30 for each rep on 1 minute recovery the thing is none of
these numbers correlated to anything i' had measured they were just hopes dreams desires and a recipe for disappointment and overtraining the mistake I continuously see amateur Runners making is when they're comparing their training to their friends or anyone faster them including the pros as they're looking at the absolute outputs they look at a 2-hour long run and they're going oh he's running pretty fast maybe I should step up my game for my 2-hour long runs well here's a quote from sy's review of hundreds of professional runners and coaches training regimes the most consistent training intensity
characteristic of elite distance Runners is most of their training greater than 80% is performed at a low intensity throughout the training year in line with previous research most of this training is executed in zone one and the duration of the easy runs is very stable throughout the year remember this is the best runners in the world and so while when I looked through everything training distribution above Zone 2 was quite varied and when you're comparing it's like well this person's in competition this person's out of competition coming back from injury and as you know there's
the Norwegian method there's polarization so above Zone 2 there were large discrepancies but one common theme stayed across every single system and that was slow Zone one running that's where absolute and relative intensity are going to be super important when we're comparing ourselves to others because you me and kog can all run a Zone one run but our Pace outputs are going to be completely different to provide an example I'm going to take koga's numbers and a sub three-hour marathon runners numbers now the researchers use percentage of maximal heart rate along with some other measures
to set this seven zone system I also use a seven zone system but I use lactate threshold now I don't have anyone's maximal heart rate numbers but I do have an inference of their threshold so Kip chog is going to be around 250 minutes per kilm and a sub three-hour marathon runner should be around a 4minute k or around a 620 odd minutes per mile using those numbers I can make up the seven zones and use a percentage of that to figure out Zone one and in doing that as a comparison to the maximal heart
rate s zone system that the researchers use mine's pretty close let's take a look at your standard weekend long run according to the research for pro Runners there's going to be 30 to 40 km at about 75% of their lactate threshold for a kog there around 4 minutes per K or mid 620 minute per mile for a 3-hour marathon runner there going to be around a 520 minute perk or 8 minute mile are you running that slow for your long runs because in both scenarios each of those Runners kep chog again the 3-hour marathon runner
is running at 70 5% of their lactate threshold but that's just the long run Elite Runners will typically run that closer to their Zone to their easy runs are done far slower than that according to the research they're going to run those around 430 to 5 minutes per K High sevens minute per mile it's around 57 to 63% of the lactate threshold if we have a look at that 3-hour marathon runner that's going to be equivalent to running 620 to 7 minutes per K or 1015 to 1120 minute mile are you ever running slower than
11 minute mile if you're close to a 3-hour marathon but let's imagine you did run a lot of your runs slower than an 11 minute mile or around 7 minutes per K how do you think you'd feel the next day probably pretty good you'd probably think yeah I could smash a session after doing an 11 minute mile for an hour and I bet you'd probably be a to log more miles on average without burnout or injury and that's exactly what a client of mine did when he started running he just started running as slow as
kind of possible and just kept clocking up getting up to 60 m a week around close to 100ks a week in 5 months without any injury and consistently has been getting faster endurance rewards consistency chronic consistent stimulus leads to adaptation running slowly specifically applies an aerobic Demand on our card vascular metabolic and muscle systems that they must adapt to thereby becoming more aerobically efficient enhancing our overall aerobic capacity our fitness The Chronic and consistent part which is so important to the fitness equation can be help by running slowly because it reduces the impact loading through
our sceletal system muscles and tendons which minimizes our overall risk of injury and needing time off of running and the European Journal of Applied physiology has shown that just by running at any speed the neurological adaptations to running makes us more efficient in the movement of running itself lowering our overall energetic cost of running at any speed so we just become more efficient by doing the action now before you throw shade at me for trying to ruin your stra game with all the slow running it is important to note that Elite Runners are running 100
to 140 m a week that's 160 to over 200ks across 11 to 14 sessions each and every week you're not doing that so there is an argument to be made that you should be trying to maximize the stimulus of your aerobic runs not minimize it and that you should run at the middle to the top of Zone 2 so you can get the most out of each aerobic run however my counterargument to that is that there's a reason you and I aren't professional runners and a lot of it has to do with our capacity to
train and absorb training load from what I've seen that's typically around 6 to 8 hours or that 50 m a week Mark what I think you should be trying to do is maximize the distribution of your capacitor train so let's say that training load is two hard sessions across 5 days that equals 7 hours of running you want to distribute your training load in a way that guarantees consistency across a chronic timeline months on end and that you can nail each and every one of your hard sessions and your long runs across these months and
that you can stand on the start line feeling free fresh and energized not hoping your rig's going to hold together and wishing you'd strung together a few more hard sessions and I do believe that integrating a fair amount of slow running into a runner's program can help their long-term performance doesn't need to be every run but next week one and you try two Zone one runs and you can label them on stra as Pro style if you know you know so you look kind of legit running half your normal run speed so what are some
of the Practical steps we can Implement from now number one is going to be assess your thresholds you can assess your aerobic threshold by running in the middle of Zone 2 and trying to hold a heart rate as steady as possible for 30 minutes you can take a lap every mile or 5 minutes or K and you can track that Trend over time do it every few weeks and see if you can improve your pace or power output for the same high rate that's going to give you an indication of the progress of your aerobic
capacity to find your anerobic threshold you can do my 30 minute test and you can throw it into my calculator number two is Monitor our training load you can use garmin's training status strava's relative effort or something like training pix's training stress score we want to find out what is the training load of each of the different kind of sessions that we do our new Zone one runs or our long run Progressive hill repeats we want to see what does that training load look like across each individual session and how does that look cumulatively across
a week we can then manipulate our training volume and intensity of those sessions so that we can find the maximal training efficiency number three is going to be listen to your body record a bit of subjective feedback after each run you can compare it to your training load and figure out what works best and when soreness and tiredness and fatigue start to kick in at a certain training load either cumulatively across weeks or specific sessions actioning these three steps is going to have you well set up to follow my four-phase approach to marathon training hope
to see you on the next one and all the best with your next run see you
