Jan 6, 2025 | Uncategorized
At this time of year, many athletes are setting goals for what they hope to achieve in the coming months and are starting to develop annual training plans to aim towards those goals. As runners, it’s natural to focus on outcomes—hitting a personal best, running...
Jun 15, 2022 | Uncategorized
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...
Apr 21, 2020 | Uncategorized
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...
Feb 22, 2020 | Uncategorized
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...
May 9, 2019 | Uncategorized
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...
Mar 18, 2017 | Uncategorized
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...
Sep 28, 2016 | Uncategorized
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...
Aug 14, 2016 | Uncategorized
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...
Jul 26, 2016 | Uncategorized
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...
Jul 15, 2016 | Uncategorized
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...
