If you decide to train as your body “wants,” speaking through the intuitive feelings of the heart, you’ll almost certainly be in for some slow running – perhaps more than you’re used to, or would prefer.
The intuitive heart will also tell you when it’s safe to run fast, however – even very fast. (See Chapter 17: “The 96% Run.”) But, if my own experience is a guide, the body does like a long warmup. How long and how slow will, of course, depend on your age, weight, basic speed, V02Max, biodynamics, health, DNA, fitness, diet, and countless other factors, including the weather. Still, a question that’s bound to vex many runners is “How will I ever get faster, if I’m running slowly for much of the time?”
Can slow running make you faster? The short answer is, of course: yes and no. Pure, 100% slow running can improve your speed, but only if you’re running high mileage – it may take 70-100+ miles per week. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll get any faster, assuming you’ve achieved basic fitness, if you’re just slowly jogging 25-30 miles a week.
In her book Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Ultimate Truth About Health and Exercise, New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata describes a study on trainability in elderly subjects, conducted by exercise scientist Claude Bouchard at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Bouchard found that 10% of the subjects tested had bodies that were extremely trainable, while 80% had bodies that responded across a spectrum of average trainability, and 10% had bodies that weren’t trainable at all, at least during the duration of the study. The study has been widely criticized, perhaps even discredited. But, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the percentages are accurate. Surely it is obvious that talent varies across the broad spectrum of runners, with fewer runners at the elite end of the curve.
Assuming, also, that the results are valid for other age groups, and that you’re among the talented top 10%, gifted with awesome speed and exceptional VO2Max and biodynamics, you may find that slow-paced, low-mileage training brings rapid, spectacular gains, if only at the shorter racing distances. But that’s because you were born to run, not because of your training. You’ve probably met people like that, who can run spectacular times on very little training, or who thrive on high mileage. Try not to hate them.
Where do speed and endurance come from? Basic speed is inherited. Too bad, but there it is – your VO2Max and biodynamics were determined by your mom and dad – your DNA. Although running high mileage and doing speedwork can help you make the most of your gifts, they won’t make you an Olympian. Great runners are born.
Science has yet to explain conclusively why large volumes of slow running help make us faster. Some researchers, including Olympic 800- and 1500-meter gold medalist Peter Snell, now an exercise researcher at the University of Texas, speculate that long, slow runs may exhaust the “slow-twitch” muscle fibers, forcing the trainable type 2x fast-twitch fibers to take over part of the load, with the result that we acquire more of these fibers and become faster.
When Snell joined Arthur Lydiard’s training group and went for his first 22-mile long run with the team, he became tired after 15 miles and told Murray Halberg that he was thinking of dropping out. But Halberg, who would win the 5000 meters at the 1960 Rome Olympics, urged him to continue. “Do that and you’ll totally waste the workout,” he said. “The value begins at 15 miles.”
After months of doing only long, slow running, Snell was surprised to find that he could run a mile in close to 4:00, without having done any speedwork at all. Snell reports that he seldom ran more than 70 miles a week with Lydiard’s group, though he set his world mile record of 3:54.4 while training 100+ miles per week.
It seems likely that Snell’s relatively high mileage, plus the weekly 22-miler, were the main stimuli to endurance and speed during the aerobic “build-up phase.” Snell reports that the group’s long runs were done at “medium” pace: 7:00 at the beginning of the season and 6:00 toward the end – certainly moderate aerobic speeds for runners capable of running 10K in 28 minutes (4:30 pace).
Other runners, including former women’s marathon record holder Ingrid Kristiansen (2:21:06), believe that long, slow running improves speed and endurance by increasing the aerobic enzymes in a runner’s muscles. On her website (www.ingrid-kristiansen.com), Kristiansen cites a 2001 study that showed aerobic metabolism is much more important, at racing distances all the way down to 400 meters, than exercise physiologists previously realized.1
The “increased-enzymes” theory appears to be supported by the experience of runners who train mostly at aerobic speeds and seldom go farther than 15-18 miles, yet race extremely well at the marathon distance and beyond. Kristiansen seldom ran longer than two hours, or about 16-18 miles. Bruce Fordyce, the great South African ultramarathoner and eight-times winner of the 53.8-mile Comrades Marathon, seldom trained longer than 20-22 miles. Another ultrarunner who achieved notable success while rarely going past 22 miles is Ray Krolewicz, of whom we’ll hear more later. (Caveat: “RayK” occasionally ran 20 miles two or three times on the same day.)
There are at least five classic ways to do speedwork, and all but one of them permit – indeed, demand – a large base of long, slow running.
1. First, there’s speedwork of the most traditional kind. Go to the track 1-3 times a week, year-round, and do intervals or repeats. Frank Shorter followed this plan. In his prime, Shorter ran 140 miles per week, of which roughly 7%, or 10 miles, was speedwork. Most of his 130 weekly miles of slower running was at 7:00 pace, which for Shorter was quite easy. In the last miles of his weekly 20-miler, Shorter would accelerate from 6:30 to 5:00 pace. (Note that Shorter’s marathon PR of 2:10:30 translates to 4:59 pace; thus those 5-minute training miles were definitely aerobic – they were by no means “tempo” or “anaerobic threshold” running, which translates approximately to half-marathon pace.)
John L. Parker, Jr., a teammate of Shorter’s during his peak competitive years, describes their training:
The early Florida Track Club boasted a number of runners who could easily run right around 5:00 per mile in training runs, but Jack Bacheler, the Olympian who was our mentor, insisted that many of our training miles be run in the 7:00-8:00 min/mile range. He simply felt that you needed to run that slow in order to truly recover from the hard intervals and AT [anaerobic threshold] runs that made up the rest of the program. He also maintained that it was the only way to safely amass the kind of total weekly mileage he felt we should aim for: 100 or more per week. And Bacheler was on two U.S. Olympic teams and was the best U.S. runner at several distances for several years in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s….
The interesting thing about Bacheler’s approach to training was that Florida Track Clubbers could tell other runners about the program in great detail, or writers could describe it fully to their readers, but until runners actually came to Gainesville to run with the group, no one could fully appreciate it. They simply couldn’t believe that world-class runners would spend so much of their time running so slowly.2
Ultrarunner Ray Krolewicz’s training sets him apart from ordinary mortals. In a fairly average month, Ray ran 87 times, totaling 623 miles, or 154+ miles per week. Ray has always done the bulk of his training at a slow pace, yet he races breathtakingly fast. Recalling one of his many 100K (62.2-mile) races, he reports:
I wanted the psychological boost of breaking 2:40 [for the marathon distance] en route to 100K [62.2 mi]. I did in fact run 2:37:20, exactly six-minute pace, off of 10-minute-mile average training pace. I continued to a 3:09:51 50K, 5:35 50-mile, and 7:12 100K. I ran many 2:41-2:50 marathons, both in marathons and en route to ultra distances.
High mileage helped Ray make the best of his natural gifts, which include an amazing, almost certainly inherited ability to handle very high mileage year-round, plus excellent, though not world-class, basic speed. Ray reports:
My 400m PR in high school was 56.4. I ran many [400m’s] between 58-60, including consecutively. Most recently, I’ve run 60-65 pretty much at will, including 64 twice on final laps of 100-mile races. I even did a 70 once for the last lap of a six-day race, which would have been faster, but I was catching Don Choi, who was winning the race, and I did not want to pass him right before his finish and steal any of his moment, so I slowed to finish several seconds after he crossed the line (probably a 65-67 effort).
Krolewicz believes in high-mileage training at a very slow pace, plus a hefty amount of speedwork:
It is all about the mileage. “Quality” leads to injuries, breakdowns, and general fatigue; 200 miles a week [of slow training] actually works well for [racing] 100 miles. When I ran 150-ish for a number of weeks, I was able to run pretty fast for 100 miles a few times, and in a large number of 100Ks.
On my forays into 200-mile-a-week territory, I grew so strong that I was dangerous. My PR 5-miler of 27:31 (5:30-ish per mile) was the Saturday morning after completing a 212-mile training week the night before. Average pace for the week was about 11:20, but 10% speedwork (yeah, 21 miles) was all done in 400s and 800s between 70 and 90 seconds per lap.
Many mid-pack marathoners can’t train more than 60-70 miles per week without getting ill or injured. Three-time Western States 100 winner Jim King seldom ran more than 70 miles per week. RayK is simply awesome.
2. The second type of classic speedwork is Lydiard-style “periodization.” Following at least three months of pure, medium-paced aerobic running (the “endurance” phase), do several weeks of hill work (the “strengthening” phase), then spend 6-8 weeks doing 1-3 hard speedwork sessions per week (the “sharpening” phase) in preparation for a target race.
3. Third, you can do all your training runs at slow speed, and use frequent short races as speedwork. Some very successful runners have trained this way, including Ingrid Kristiansen, whose marathon record (2:21:06) stood for 14 years (1984-98). Other standout runners who’ve raced short distances to hone their speed include former US 50-mile champion and sixth-place Boston finisher Bob Deines, and super-senior phenomenon Ed Whitlock.
Joe Henderson, the Runner’s World founding editor, now a columnist for Marathon & Beyond, is a great admirer of Whitlock. In his online column, “Running Commentary” (www. joehenderson.com), Joe writes:
This amazing Canadian runner ran a 2:54 marathon–at age 73. Whitlock’s training is irreducibly simple – he runs two hours a day, in a single run, at 9-minute pace, and he races often at varied distances. Before the record marathon, he trained “a little faster” for 16 weeks, running two hours per day for three days and three hours a day for four. He says, “The more training one does, the better – if one can avoid injury, and I was fortunate in that regard. Simple LSD [long, slow distance] works for me – no fancy training routines.”
Two awe-inspiring veterans whose training is similar to Whitlock’s are Ed Phillips and John Keston. Henderson writes:
Phillips ran a 2:47 marathon at age 64. His training? “My plan is to alternate days of 10 and 15 miles. That’s the goal, but I rarely meet it.”
In the three months before Royal Victoria, he ran 25 miles six times (plus five more 21s). His pace was as relaxed as 8:35 per mile and only twice dipped under eight. This for a runner who averaged 6:17s at Royal Victoria.
“I think you’d be surprised at how slow I train,” said Herb. “Eight-minute pace is fine with me, and 9:30 per mile is okay too.” The slowness lets him go long, often, without hurting himself.
Where did that speed come from? His races – four of them during September alone (before the early October marathon), none longer than 10K, none slower than six-minute pace.
Herb Phillips ended with a warning that Ed Whitlock probably would echo: “This is not a recommended plan. It works for me; it won’t necessarily work for anyone else. It definitely won’t work for an inexperienced or an elite runner.”
John Keston is another amazing veteran who trains slowly. Joe Henderson reports:
John Keston uses a variation of Whitlock’s plan. He runs for about two hours every third day, and walks for similar time on the in-between days.
Yet John can go much farther on race day. Last fall he became the oldest marathoner to break 3-1/2 hours, running 3:23 at age 76. A year older, he recently ran 3:34 at Napa Valley – on a slightly sprained ankle.
There are two other classic approaches to speedwork.
4. Do some speedwork during every run, after a long, slow warmup – but only if your body gives you a clear and unambiguous OK to do so. Limit fast running to the times when your body, speaking through heart rate, morning pulse, breathing, and intuition, “tells” you it’s safe to go fast.
This is similar to the approach John Douillard suggests in Body, Mind, and Sport. Douillard recommends monitoring the body’s needs by checking heart rate, breathing, and feelings of “comfort.” (More on Douillard later.)
5. Finally, you can train like Emil Zatopek, the only runner ever to win the 5000, 10,000, and marathon at the same Olympic Games (1952). In his excellent book, Running with the Legends, Michael Sandrock describes “Zato’s” training:
He was constantly pushing himself in workouts, and always thinking of new ways to train. According to Fred Wilt in How They Train, his main workout in 1951 was 20 X 200 meters, followed by 40 X 400 meters, then another 20 X 200 meters, all with 200-meter jog intervals. It is hard to know exactly how fast Zatopek was running his intervals, because he never timed them. Zatopek’s philosophy of training, says Wilt, was to work as hard as possible so that a race seemed comparatively easy. He felt that strength and energy only increase through continual testing. Zatopek had no fear of becoming “burned out.” He had such unbelievable willpower that he could impose any burden of training he preferred upon himself…. Before Zatopek, nobody realized it was humanly possible to train this hard.
Probably not everyone’s cup of tea. But what’s clear is that some speedwork is required for a runner, whether world-class or mid-pack, to extract the last measure of performance from his or her body.
Philip Maffetone, the coach of triathlon superstar Mark Allen, believes the kind of speedwork makes little difference; that the results are about the same from intervals, threshold runs, fartlek, repeats, or frequent short races. But research clearly shows this is wrong, since intervals improve VO2Max more effectively than tempo runs.
While you’re enduring the slow warmup, it may help to remind yourself that your intuition won’t always tell you to train slowly. Although the body does appreciate a warmup, it also appears to “like” running fast when conditions allow.
The “rules” for fast running are fairly inflexible, however. Some are obvious: the body resists going fast when it’s ill, tired, malnourished, injured, etc. Most days, those conditions probably won’t apply. But there’s one restriction that all runners will encounter during every run: the body doesn’t like to go fast until it’s good and ready.
As an old guy of 66, I find that it can take anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes of gradually faster shuffling before my ancient body feels truly ready to stretch out and run.
Even with all my old-putz patience, for a long time the long warmup would drive me nuts. Yet my best runs always happened when I ground my teeth and made myself run at the body’s preferred pace. After anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, assuming I’m healthy, if I speed up tentatively, my body will send a clear message that it’s ready to roll. Those “ready-to-run” feelings generally coincide with a slight drop in heart rate at the same pace, plus deep, easy, regular breathing, and a relaxed, loose feeling in my legs while running at the faster pace. It feels like falling effortlessly into faster running.
No research has been done on the value of a very long warmup, yet I’m convinced it’s one of running’s undiscovered secrets. (Again, see Chapter 17: “The 96% Run.”)
Thirty years ago, I raced often at 12-18 miles. I seldom warmed up longer than 10 minutes for those races, wanting to spare my energy for the main event. Yet I suffered terribly for the first 60-80 minutes, until my body found its groove. I suspect I could have avoided most of the pain if I had warmed up properly.
Some outstanding athletes have known about the magic of the long warmup. Eddy Merckx, the legendary Belgian cyclist who won the Tour de France five times from 1969-1974, always rode an easy 20-30 miles (60-75 minutes) before each Tour stage, to ease his body into the hard racing ahead.
Before competing at 10,000 meters on the track, Bob Deines, former US 50-mile record holder (5:22:55) and twice a sixth-place finisher at Boston (2:20:48), would generally warm up with an easy 12-mile jog (90-110 minutes).
How long should you warm up? A 20-year-old body will be ready to run sooner than one that’s over 40. Inner feeling is the guide. The body will tell you when it’s ready to go fast. When you speed up, there’ll be a feeling of relaxed ease.
How fast should you run during the warmup? As a general guideline, start at a speed that’s completely comfortable, where your breathing is slow and deep and there isn’t even a trace of discomfort. Don’t force yourself to run too slowly; let yourself run at a pace that feels natural. After a while, speed up tentatively. Notice the point where discomfort begins, then back off until you’re comfortable again. The fine line between comfort and discomfort is subtle; it’s a barely noticeable unease, a jangling disharmony. If you’re healthy, fit and rested, there will be a point during the warmup where you’ll be able to pick up the pace without discomfort. You’ll rarely have to run the entire warmup at the same slow pace – as the body warms up, it will comfortably go faster.
Special case: You’ve probably had the experience of starting a run where your running shoes turned into wings. On days like that, you might need only 50 percent of your usual warmup time, or less. Who knows why? Sometimes it all comes together – you’re healthy and you feel great. On those days, I believe there’s absolutely no harm in going with the flow of positive energy.
At least three published training systems that I’m aware of are consistent with a gradual warmup, and an intuitive approach to reading the body’s signals. For fun, I’ll call them “Slow,” “Slower,” and “Slowest.”
First, however, it’s important to remember that “slow” is relative. David L. Costill, Ph.D., a world-renowned sports physiologist, once tested former marathon world record holder Derek Clayton (2:08:33) in his lab. Costill describes the experiment in his book, Running: The Athlete Within (p. 16):
When asked to run 10 km on the treadmill at a pace that equaled his best marathon pace (4 min: 53 s per mile), he [Clayton] was able to do it with apparent ease, carrying on a conversation with everyone in the laboratory. Nearing the end of the run we asked him if he could continue the run at that pace. He responded by saying, “Yeh, I can run another hour if you want me to.” Of course we thought he might be putting on a show for the other runners in the room, so we drew a blood sample from his arm immediately after the run to determine his lactate level, an indication of running effort. To our surprise, his blood lactate level was only 1.8 mmol/liter, a value one might expect to find in someone who had not been exercising. Nevertheless, when we calculated his oxygen use during the run it averaged over 85% of his VO2max….
This ability to exercise at a high percentage of one’s VO2max for long periods without accumulating lactic acid is not fully understood, though it appears that this quality is a function of the muscular adaptations during training.
Aside from the fact, mentioned in the Introduction, that the lactic acid theory of fatigue has been scientifically disproved, Clayton’s ability to hold a relaxed conversation at 4:53 pace is amazing. This is a guy you would not want to invite to go for a friendly jog.
Parenthetically, Clayton was very large for a marathoner. When he ran his 2:08:33 record, he weighed 162 pounds. Compare that figure to today’s world-class Africans, who average just 118 pounds. If Clayton had weighed 40 pounds less, it seems likely that the Africans would still be chasing his dust.
Costill notes, “Some of the best runners we have tested were able to run at 75 to 85% of VO2max during a marathon. [Alberto] Salazar, [Bill] Rodgers, and [Grete] Waitz were able to run rather comfortably for up to 30 min at 86 to 90% of their VO2max values. So champion runners might have a higher capacity for tolerating high levels of stress than those of us who run in the middle or back of the pack.”
Here are the most most successful slow, slower, and slowest training systems that I know of:
1. “Slow.” Because Joe Henderson was among the first and best-known advocates of slow training, he’s been unfairly blamed for a range of ills in US running, ranging from the decline in American performances at the Olympic level, to the newly respectable status of the four-hour marathon. These charges are completely unfounded. In over 45 years of writing about running, Henderson has never recommended that runners train only at “LSD” pace, except for basic fitness.
What Joe actually said, in his classic 1969 book, Long, Slow Distance: The Humane Way to Train, is that gifted competitive runners cannot hope to realize their full potential without hard speedwork. It’s also important to understand that, at the time Joe wrote his book, “long, slow distance” was considered to be anything slower than about 7:00 pace – not “10-minute pace and and slower,” as the term “LSD” has come to be defined today.
Joe also suggested, quite reasonably, that it might not make sense for a mid-pack runner to log 100-mile weeks and twice-weekly speedwork to lower his marathon PR from 3:20 to 2:59. Most grown-up runners have obligations that make running 15-20 hours a week a questionable proposition.
Frank Shorter said that if a talented runner will do two hard interval sessions and a long run weekly, and fill in with slow running for a total of 100 miles, and if he’ll stick to the program for two or three years, he’ll “get good.” That’s exactly the training Henderson recommended for talented runners in Long, Slow Distance. (Joe has graciously posted this long-out-of-print book on his website: www.joehenderson.com.)
Here’s how Joe defines long, slow distance:
My definition of “LSD” pace, from the time I first wrote about it more than 30 years ago, has been runs of one or more minutes per mile slower than current racing ability for the same distance. Refining that now, I’d say that adding one minute puts you at the dividing line between a moderate and a hard pace. Adding two minutes takes you to the line between moderate and easy.
During easy runs, Henderson recommends going “comfortably, not too fast or too slow.” Based on his experience coaching hundreds of beginning runners in his University of Oregon fitness classes, Joe says most people tend to settle in at about 1-1/2 minutes per mile slower than top speed. (As mentioned earlier, Frank Shorter did most of his slow training at 7:00 pace, yet he ran the marathon at 4:59 pace, a difference of two minutes per mile.)
2. “Slower.” In his book Training for Endurance, Philip Maffetone recommends running most of the time at “180-minus pace.” Subtract your age from 180. If you’ve been exercising at least four times a week for two years or more, use this figure as your maximum aerobic training heart rate. If you’ve been training regularly and competing for at least two years, add 5 beats. If you’re 65 or older, you can add up to 10 beats. If you’re 16 or under, Maffetone recommends training at a maximum heart rate of 165. These figures shouldn’t be rigidly adhered to; Maffetone suggests finding a comfortable pace near the 180-minus figure where your gait feels relaxed, natural and smooth.
Maffetone recommends spending many months training no faster than the slow, 180-minus pace, followed by 5-8 weeks of intense speedwork and racing before an important goal event. Over the weeks and months of slow running, your speed at the 180-minus heart rate should gradually get faster.
Many successful athletes have used Maffetone’s system, including six-time Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon winner Mark Allen, short-course triathlon world champion Mike Pigg, and Priscilla Welch, the world women’s masters marathon record holder (2:26:51 at age 41; Welch also won the New York City marathon at age 42).
3. “Slowest.” When John Douillard’s career as a professional triathlete stalled-out on traditional, high-stress, “pain-is-gain” training, he sought the advice of an expert in the ancient Indian healing art of Ayurveda. After reducing his mileage, changing his diet, getting more sleep, and spending time meditating, Douillard began finishing in the top three in his races. He later came across an ancient text that recommended that most exercise be done at just 50% of the body’s maximum capacity. Douillard chose to interpret this figure as 50% of maximum heart rate by the Karvonen formula.3
Because age-based formulas for maximum heart rate are notoriously inaccurate, Douillard recommends using the resulting “optimum training heart rate” as a starting point; the important thing is to exercise slightly below the level where the first, subtle feelings of “discomfort” begin. Douillard’s system relies on heart rate, breathing, and inner feelings of “comfort” to judge the body’s needs.
In a Douillard-style run, you begin by walking for a specified time (no longer than 5-10 minutes) that depends on your Ayurvedic body type. You then exercise at the 50% rate, while breathing through the nose and making a “Darth Vader” sound on exhalation, as described in the last chapter. (Comparable to saying “Aah!” as if blowing out a candle, while exhaling through the nose.)
After running at the 50% pace for a time also determined by your body type, you speed up tentatively and check your breathing and the sensation of comfort or discomfort. If you can run faster with complete comfort, while breathing slowly with a pause at the end of the out-breath, you can run as fast and as far as your legs will take you (until your breathing becomes labored again). Douillard cautions runners not to try this kind of training until basic fitness is achieved, using the methods described in his book.
A minor caveat about heart-rate training. During long runs, particularly on warm days, your heart rate will “drift” upward. It can be frustrating when the monitor “tells you” to slow to a crawl, yet you feel fine running faster. When my heart rate rises on a hot day, I suspect the “safe” aerobic heart-rate range rises also, since my breathing usually remains deep and relaxed at a higher-than-normal heart rate. It’s a different feeling when my heart rate soars because I’m actually running too fast. The tip-off is that my breathing becomes ragged and uncomfortable; there’s no mistaking those signals – it’s time to slow down.
Several other coaches have preached slow training, including Ernst Van Aaken, MD, coach of former world 2000-meter record holder and Olympic 5000-meter silver medalist Harald Norpoth of Germany. Van Aaken’s book, The Van Aaken Method, was translated and published by Runner’s World in the mid-1970s. It enjoyed considerable success, thanks in part to the endorsement of Joan Ullyot, MD, a prominent road and trail runner in San Francisco – but also because Van Aaken was an uncompromising advocate for women’s running. He sponsored the world’s first all-women’s marathon, held in his home town of Waldniel, Germany in September 1974.
Conclusions
It’s clear that slow training contributes to endurance and speed, but it won’t make you fast unless you’re running high mileage. Even if you’re running 100 miles per week, you’ll need speedwork to extract the last measure of your speed.
The question remains: what kind of slow (and fast) running is best?
From our brief survey of slow-running systems, it may seem valid to assume that any kind of slow running works about as well as another, so long as we’re doing enough of it and not just slogging along. Frank Shorter did 80-86% of his training at roughly 7:00 pace, which for him was quite easy. Noureddine Morceli, arguably the greatest middle-distance runner of all time, did plenty of slow running – and, incredibly, he did much of it at 10-minute pace. Ultramarathoner Ray Krolewicz raced the 100K distance (62.2 miles) at close to 6:00 pace, yet he ran all of his slow miles as “10’s or 11’s.” Of course, Morceli and Krolewicz trained very hard year-round also.
How slow should you go? How fast? How far?
It’s good to remember how training works. Training has two parts: we “push our edges” – make the body do a little more than it’s used to – and then we give it a chance to rest and recover. The body grows stronger when we rest, not while we’re running. And because each body is unique, it’s up to you to figure out the speed, distance, and rest that will make your body grow stronger and not tear it down. To do that, you’ll have to “nudge your edges” and continually check how you feel, during your runs and afterward.
Day by day, week by week, you must fine-tune your training until you reach a point where you deeply know how your own, individual body “likes” to run – the kind of running your body thrives on. How to know? When you’re training well, you’ll finish your runs feeling, as Arthur Lydiard put it, “pleasantly tired,” but never wholly spent. Training that results deep, prison-camp fatigue is your enemy.
The most important key to training well is finding that balance – knowing how much and how fast you can safely train, and how much rest you need. That’s why it’s extremely helpful to keep a training diary, and increase your training in small, regular increments. Without the steadying influence of the diary, the mind can all too easily rationalize the spontaneous urge to run too fast or far.
Take a tip from two of the greatest endurance athletes of all time, ultramarathoner Bruce Fordyce of South Africa, and triathlete Mark Allen. Fordyce won South Africa’s famed 53.8-mile Comrades Marathon eight years in a row, and the historic 52-mile London to Brighton race three times consecutively. Allen won the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon six times. Both were extremely careful when it came to planning their training and racing.
Fordyce believed in being cautious “to the point of paranoia”:
My training advice is going to be different…because I place my emphasis on rest and recovery. I do believe in hard training, but there is only so much hard training that the body can take, and the timing and duration of any hard training phase is very important. During the hard training phase, never be afraid to take a day off. If your legs are feeling unduly stiff and sore, rest; if you are at all sluggish, rest; in fact, if you doubt, rest.4
Like Fordyce, Mark Allen believed easy running played an indispensable role in his success. Dr. Timothy Noakes reports:
In a discussion I had with him in Pajalahti, Finland, Allen added that the key to his longevity was the three months of gentle aerobic training in the Patience Phase. His belief is that once you begin speed training, the body enters a hyped-up state that wears you down, as you are unable to sleep properly and recover adequately during this period. Thus, in his opinion, intensive training produces a cumulative fatiguing effect, which is not due solely to the actual training performed but also to a residual effect that acts during the recovery period between training sessions.5
When Noakes asked Allen why more triathletes weren’t using the methods that had brought him so much success, “Allen answered that many athletes are too ego-driven. They can’t wait to perform well and will not accept anyone else’s ideas.”
The body changes slowly. It takes at least two weeks for the body to adapt after a single hard training session. That’s how long the body requires to synthesize proteins and build new tissue in response to the hard workout. Runners who try to force their bodies to “change faster,” only succeed in overloading their body’s natural regenerative processes, with the result that they become overtrained and have to take time off, delaying their improvement.
In this book, I talk about the value of learning to calmly, dispassionately feel what your body needs, moment by moment. Intuition – calm feeling – can help you make better decisions and tap into a higher intelligence that is aware of all the factors in your training and your life. That higher wisdom wants essentially just one thing for you: it wants to help you find greater happiness.
If developing your ability to run fast will expand your awareness and bring you more joy, your inner guidance will surely help you “get faster,” and get it right.
In that connection, I must issue a WARNING: If the long, slow warmup becomes deadening drudgery, you can know for certain that it’s wrong. You should never have to do anything in your training that kills joy – for example, ploddingly following a set of “rules”: “I must run 45 minutes at 65% of MHR.” Surely, you’ll need patience in the beginning, especially if you aren’t used to a long warmup. But the result should always be a feeling of joy. The greatest joy comes with high energy. And it can be hard to feel energized if you’re slogging all the time. In the chapters ahead, I’ll present a case for doing most running, after a decent warmup, at a fairly high aerobic pace, as advocated by Arthur Lydiard.
I’m skeptical of training systems, Like Phil Maffetone’s, that are based on fixed heart-rate formulas. The problem is, they seem to work well for runners who’ve been training intensely for years, but not nearly as well for those who are less fit going into the program. The first group are able to train at a reasonably brisk pace at the target heart rate, while the second group end up slogging.
I suspect that rigid, age-based formulas like Maffetone’s work very well only for the fraction of runners for whom the prescribed heart rate corresponds to a pace that improves aerobic fitness. For elites like Mark Allen, who’ve trained at a very high level for decades, the slow “MAF” heart rate may correspond to a higher level of aerobic function than for less-well-conditioned runners.
Going into the Maffetone program, Allen was chronically overtrained. It’s hardly surprising that logging months at a relatively slow pace revived his career.
Once an athlete has trained hard enough to raise his VO2Max as high as possible, it takes a very long time to lose it. For years after Peter Snell retired from active competition, he scored roughly the same VO2Max numbers, even though he had lost a great deal of general fitness. A few months of moderate-paced running will not deteriorate VO2Max.
Runners who enter the Maffetone program without ever having trained long and hard may not improve at all. For them, the “180-Minus” formula results in a running pace that doesn’t stimulate aerobic fitness.
Several years ago, I did all my running for six months at the “180-minus” pace, and my aerobic fitness failed to improve; that is, my pace at the “maximum aerobic function” heart rate got no faster, as Maffetone promised. I’m convinced it’s because I’d been training at a slow pace for years.
If you follow the online discussions of Maffetone’s program – and they are endless – you’re likely to find the participants divided into two groups: those for whom it worked well, and those for whom it didn’t work at all, or minimally.
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, your heart will occasionally give you an “okay” to run fast, perhaps even after a very short warmup. On days when you feel stale, without enthusiasm for a long warmup, try jogging for 10-15 minutes to warm up your muscles, then pick up the pace tentatively. If your body is ill, overtrained, or tired, there will be a definite, physical feeling of reluctance – like dragging a heavy sandbag. That’s your body’s way of saying “No!” But if you’re merely in a funk, the speed burst may be liberating – you’ll feel eager to “do it again.”
Fast running is important, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. A long, slow run nurtures joys of one kind, but fast running delivers pleasures of an entirely different order – it’s the joy of refreshing your body, heart, will, mind, and soul in a stream of high energy.
I don’t believe a long warmup interferes with developing speed and endurance. Physically, it prepares the body to run efficiently. With its systems properly “greased,” the body can work more efficiently; so it can get more out of long runs and speedwork, which may feel almost effortless. Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, the long warmup can give you time to attune yourself to the “still, small voice” of intuition. All of the coaches and elites I’ve quoted in this chapter advocate some fast training, without exception. Slow and fast running are both necessary. Recent studies show that doing some fast running delays age-related loss of fitness more effectively than pure slow running.
1 Spencer MR, Gastin PB. Energy system contribution during 200- to 1500-m running in highly trained athletes. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2001 Jan;33(1):157-62.
2 Parker, John. L., Jr. Heart Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot. Tallahassee, FL: Cedarwinds Publishing, 1998. 41-42.
3 (Maximum heart rate) minus (resting heart rate), divided by 2, plus resting heart rate. Douillard adjusts the formula: (220 minus age plus resting heart rate) divided by 2.
4Noakes, Lore of Running, 4th ed., p. 453
5Noakes, Lore of Running, 4th ed., p. 460
If you decide to train as your body “wants,” speaking through the intuitive feelings of the heart, you’ll almost certainly be in for some slow running – perhaps more than you’re used to, or would prefer.
The intuitive heart will also tell you when it’s safe to run fast, however – even very fast. (See Chapter 17: “The 96% Run.”) But, if my own experience is a guide, the body does like a long warmup. How long and how slow will, of course, depend on your age, weight, basic speed, V02Max, biodynamics, health, DNA, fitness, diet, and countless other factors, including the weather. Still, a question that’s bound to vex many runners is “How will I ever get faster, if I’m running slowly for much of the time?”
Can slow running make you faster? The short answer is, of course: yes and no. Pure, 100% slow running can improve your speed, but only if you’re running high mileage – it may take 70-100+ miles per week. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll get any faster, assuming you’ve achieved basic fitness, if you’re just slowly jogging 25-30 miles a week.
In her book Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Ultimate Truth About Health and Exercise, New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata describes a study on trainability in elderly subjects, conducted by exercise scientist Claude Bouchard at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Bouchard found that 10% of the subjects tested had bodies that were extremely trainable, while 80% had bodies that responded across a spectrum of average trainability, and 10% had bodies that weren’t trainable at all, at least during the duration of the study.
Assuming the results are valid for other age groups, and that you’re among the talented top 10%, gifted with awesome speed and exceptional VO2Max and biodynamics, you may find that slow-paced, low-mileage training brings rapid, spectacular gains, if only at the shorter racing distances. But that’s because you were born to run, not because of your training. You’ve probably met people like that, who can run spectacular times on very little training, or who thrive on high mileage. Try not to hate them.
Where do speed and endurance come from? Basic speed is inherited. Too bad, but there it is – your VO2Max and biodynamics were determined by your mom and dad – your DNA. Although running high mileage and doing speedwork can help you make the most of your gifts, they won’t make you an Olympian. Great runners are born.
Science has yet to explain conclusively why large volumes of slow running help make us faster. Some researchers, including Olympic 800- and 1500-meter gold medalist Peter Snell, now an exercise researcher at the University of Texas, speculate that long, slow runs may exhaust the “slow-twitch” muscle fibers, forcing the trainable type 2x fast-twitch fibers to take over part of the load, with the result that we acquire more of these fibers and become faster.
When Snell joined Arthur Lydiard’s training group and went for his first 22-mile long run with the team, he became tired after 15 miles and told Murray Halberg that he was thinking of dropping out. But Halberg, who would win the 5000 meters at the 1960 Rome Olympics, urged him to continue. “Do that and you’ll totally waste the workout,” he said. “The value begins at 15 miles.”
After months of doing only long, slow running, Snell was surprised to find that he could run a mile in close to 4:00, without having done any speedwork at all. Snell reports that he seldom ran more than 70 miles a week with Lydiard’s group, though he set his world mile record of 3:54.4 while training 100+ miles per week.
It seems likely that Snell’s relatively high mileage, plus the weekly 22-miler, were the main stimuli to endurance and speed during the aerobic “build-up phase.” Snell reports that the group’s long runs were done at “medium” pace: 7:00 at the beginning of the season and 6:00 toward the end – certainly moderate aerobic speeds for runners capable of running 10K in 28 minutes (4:30 pace).
Other runners, including former women’s marathon record holder Ingrid Kristiansen (2:21:06), believe that long, slow running improves speed and endurance by increasing the aerobic enzymes in a runner’s muscles. On her website (www.ingrid-kristiansen.com), Kristiansen cites a 2001 study that showed aerobic metabolism is much more important, at racing distances all the way down to 400 meters, than exercise physiologists previously realized.1
The “increased-enzymes” theory appears to be supported by the experience of runners who train mostly at aerobic speeds and seldom go farther than 15-18 miles, yet race extremely well at the marathon distance and beyond. Kristiansen seldom ran longer than two hours, or about 16-18 miles. Bruce Fordyce, the great South African ultramarathoner and eight-times winner of the 53.8-mile Comrades Marathon, seldom trained longer than 20-22 miles. Another ultrarunner who achieved notable success while rarely going past 22 miles is Ray Krolewicz, of whom we’ll hear more later. (Caveat: “RayK” occasionally ran 20 miles two or three times on the same day.)
There are at least five classic ways to do speedwork, and all but one of them permit – indeed, demand – a large base of long, slow running.
1. First, there’s speedwork of the most traditional kind. Go to the track 1-3 times a week, year-round, and do intervals or repeats. Frank Shorter followed this plan. In his prime, Shorter ran 140 miles per week, of which roughly 7%, or 10 miles, was speedwork. Most of his 130 weekly miles of slower running was at 7:00 pace, which for Shorter was quite easy. In the last miles of his weekly 20-miler, Shorter would accelerate from 6:30 to 5:00 pace. (Note that Shorter’s marathon PR of 2:10:30 translates to 4:59 pace; thus those 5-minute training miles were definitely aerobic – they were by no means “tempo” or “anaerobic threshold” running, which translates approximately to half-marathon pace.)
John L. Parker, Jr., a teammate of Shorter’s during his peak competitive years, describes their training:
The early Florida Track Club boasted a number of runners who could easily run right around 5:00 per mile in training runs, but Jack Bacheler, the Olympian who was our mentor, insisted that many of our training miles be run in the 7:00-8:00 min/mile range. He simply felt that you needed to run that slow in order to truly recover from the hard intervals and AT [anaerobic threshold] runs that made up the rest of the program. He also maintained that it was the only way to safely amass the kind of total weekly mileage he felt we should aim for: 100 or more per week. And Bacheler was on two U.S. Olympic teams and was the best U.S. runner at several distances for several years in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s….
The interesting thing about Bacheler’s approach to training was that Florida Track Clubbers could tell other runners about the program in great detail, or writers could describe it fully to their readers, but until runners actually came to Gainesville to run with the group, no one could fully appreciate it. They simply couldn’t believe that world-class runners would spend so much of their time running so slowly.2
Ultrarunner Ray Krolewicz’s training sets him apart from ordinary mortals. In a fairly average month, Ray ran 87 times, totaling 623 miles, or 154+ miles per week. Ray has always done the bulk of his training at a slow pace, yet he races breathtakingly fast. Recalling one of his many 100K (62.2-mile) races, he reports:
I wanted the psychological boost of breaking 2:40 [for the marathon distance] en route to 100K [62.2 mi]. I did in fact run 2:37:20, exactly six-minute pace, off of 10-minute-mile average training pace. I continued to a 3:09:51 50K, 5:35 50-mile, and 7:12 100K. I ran many 2:41-2:50 marathons, both in marathons and en route to ultra distances.
High mileage helped Ray make the best of his natural gifts, which include an amazing, almost certainly inherited ability to handle very high mileage year-round, plus excellent, though not world-class, basic speed. Ray reports:
My 400m PR in high school was 56.4. I ran many [400m’s] between 58-60, including consecutively. Most recently, I’ve run 60-65 pretty much at will, including 64 twice on final laps of 100-mile races. I even did a 70 once for the last lap of a six-day race, which would have been faster, but I was catching Don Choi, who was winning the race, and I did not want to pass him right before his finish and steal any of his moment, so I slowed to finish several seconds after he crossed the line (probably a 65-67 effort).
Krolewicz believes in high-mileage training at a very slow pace, plus a hefty amount of speedwork:
It is all about the mileage. “Quality” leads to injuries, breakdowns, and general fatigue; 200 miles a week [of slow training] actually works well for [racing] 100 miles. When I ran 150-ish for a number of weeks, I was able to run pretty fast for 100 miles a few times, and in a large number of 100Ks.
On my forays into 200-mile-a-week territory, I grew so strong that I was dangerous. My PR 5-miler of 27:31 (5:30-ish per mile) was the Saturday morning after completing a 212-mile training week the night before. Average pace for the week was about 11:20, but 10% speedwork (yeah, 21 miles) was all done in 400s and 800s between 70 and 90 seconds per lap.
Many mid-pack marathoners can’t train more than 60-70 miles per week without getting ill or injured. Three-time Western States 100 winner Jim King seldom ran more than 70 miles per week. RayK is simply awesome.
2. The second type of classic speedwork is Lydiard-style “periodization.” Following at least three months of pure, medium-paced aerobic running (the “endurance” phase), do several weeks of hill work (the “strengthening” phase), then spend 6-8 weeks doing 1-3 hard speedwork sessions per week (the “sharpening” phase) in preparation for a target race.
3. Third, you can do all your training runs at slow speed, and use frequent short races as speedwork. Some very successful runners have trained this way, including Ingrid Kristiansen, whose marathon record (2:21:06) stood for 14 years (1984-98). Other standout runners who’ve raced short distances to hone their speed include former US 50-mile champion and sixth-place Boston finisher Bob Deines, and super-senior phenomenon Ed Whitlock.
Joe Henderson, the Runner’s World founding editor, now a columnist for Marathon & Beyond, is a great admirer of Whitlock. In his online column, “Running Commentary” (www. joehenderson.com), Joe writes:
This amazing Canadian runner ran a 2:54 marathon–at age 73. Whitlock’s training is irreducibly simple – he runs two hours a day, in a single run, at 9-minute pace, and he races often at varied distances. Before the record marathon, he trained “a little faster” for 16 weeks, running two hours per day for three days and three hours a day for four. He says, “The more training one does, the better – if one can avoid injury, and I was fortunate in that regard. Simple LSD [long, slow distance] works for me – no fancy training routines.”
Two awe-inspiring veterans whose training is similar to Whitlock’s are Ed Phillips and John Keston. Henderson writes:
Phillips ran a 2:47 marathon at age 64. His training? “My plan is to alternate days of 10 and 15 miles. That’s the goal, but I rarely meet it.”
In the three months before Royal Victoria, he ran 25 miles six times (plus five more 21s). His pace was as relaxed as 8:35 per mile and only twice dipped under eight. This for a runner who averaged 6:17s at Royal Victoria.
“I think you’d be surprised at how slow I train,” said Herb. “Eight-minute pace is fine with me, and 9:30 per mile is okay too.” The slowness lets him go long, often, without hurting himself.
Where did that speed come from? His races – four of them during September alone (before the early October marathon), none longer than 10K, none slower than six-minute pace.
Herb Phillips ended with a warning that Ed Whitlock probably would echo: “This is not a recommended plan. It works for me; it won’t necessarily work for anyone else. It definitely won’t work for an inexperienced or an elite runner.”
John Keston is another amazing veteran who trains slowly. Joe Henderson reports:
John Keston uses a variation of Whitlock’s plan. He runs for about two hours every third day, and walks for similar time on the in-between days.
Yet John can go much farther on race day. Last fall he became the oldest marathoner to break 3-1/2 hours, running 3:23 at age 76. A year older, he recently ran 3:34 at Napa Valley – on a slightly sprained ankle.
There are two other classic approaches to speedwork.
4. Do some speedwork during every run, after a long, slow warmup – but only if your body gives you a clear and unambiguous OK to do so. Limit fast running to the times when your body, speaking through heart rate, morning pulse, breathing, and intuition, “tells” you it’s safe to go fast.
This is similar to the approach John Douillard suggests in Body, Mind, and Sport. Douillard recommends monitoring the body’s needs by checking heart rate, breathing, and feelings of “comfort.” (More on Douillard later.)
5. Finally, you can train like Emil Zatopek, the only runner ever to win the 5000, 10,000, and marathon at the same Olympic Games (1952). In his excellent book, Running with the Legends, Michael Sandrock describes “Zato’s” training:
He was constantly pushing himself in workouts, and always thinking of new ways to train. According to Fred Wilt in How They Train, his main workout in 1951 was 20 X 200 meters, followed by 40 X 400 meters, then another 20 X 200 meters, all with 200-meter jog intervals. It is hard to know exactly how fast Zatopek was running his intervals, because he never timed them. Zatopek’s philosophy of training, says Wilt, was to work as hard as possible so that a race seemed comparatively easy. He felt that strength and energy only increase through continual testing. Zatopek had no fear of becoming “burned out.” He had such unbelievable willpower that he could impose any burden of training he preferred upon himself…. Before Zatopek, nobody realized it was humanly possible to train this hard.
Probably not everyone’s cup of tea. But what’s clear is that some speedwork is required for a runner, whether world-class or mid-pack, to extract the last measure of performance from his or her body.
Philip Maffetone, the coach of triathlon superstar Mark Allen, believes the kind of speedwork makes little difference; that the results are about the same from intervals, threshold runs, fartlek, repeats, or frequent short races. But research clearly shows this is wrong, since intervals improve VO2Max more effectively than tempo runs.
While you’re enduring the slow warmup, it may help to remind yourself that your intuition won’t always tell you to train slowly. Although the body does appreciate a warmup, it also appears to “like” running fast when conditions allow.
The “rules” for fast running are fairly inflexible, however. Some are obvious: the body resists going fast when it’s ill, tired, malnourished, injured, etc. Most days, those conditions probably won’t apply. But there’s one restriction that all runners will encounter during every run: the body doesn’t like to go fast until it’s good and ready.
As an old guy of 66, I find that it can take anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes of gradually faster shuffling before my ancient body feels truly ready to stretch out and run.
Even with all my old-putz patience, for a long time the long warmup would drive me nuts. Yet my best runs always happened when I ground my teeth and made myself run at the body’s preferred pace. After anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, assuming I’m healthy, if I speed up tentatively, my body will send a clear message that it’s ready to roll. Those “ready-to-run” feelings generally coincide with a slight drop in heart rate at the same pace, plus deep, easy, regular breathing, and a relaxed, loose feeling in my legs while running at the faster pace. It feels like falling effortlessly into faster running.
No research has been done on the value of a very long warmup, yet I’m convinced it’s one of running’s undiscovered secrets. (Again, see Chapter 17: “The 96% Run.”)
Thirty years ago, I raced often at 12-18 miles. I seldom warmed up longer than 10 minutes for those races, wanting to spare my energy for the main event. Yet I suffered terribly for the first 60-80 minutes, until my body found its groove. I suspect I could have avoided most of the pain if I had warmed up properly.
Some outstanding athletes have known about the magic of the long warmup. Eddy Merckx, the legendary Belgian cyclist who won the Tour de France five times from 1969-1974, always rode an easy 20-30 miles (60-75 minutes) before each Tour stage, to ease his body into the hard racing ahead.
Before competing at 10,000 meters on the track, Bob Deines, former US 50-mile record holder (5:22:55) and twice a sixth-place finisher at Boston (2:20:48), would generally warm up with an easy 12-mile jog (90-110 minutes).
How long should you warm up? A 20-year-old body will be ready to run sooner than one that’s over 40. Inner feeling is the guide. The body will tell you when it’s ready to go fast. When you speed up, there’ll be a feeling of relaxed ease.
How fast should you run during the warmup? As a general guideline, start at a speed that’s completely comfortable, where your breathing is slow and deep and there isn’t even a trace of discomfort. Don’t force yourself to run too slowly; let yourself run at a pace that feels natural. After a while, speed up tentatively. Notice the point where discomfort begins, then back off until you’re comfortable again. The fine line between comfort and discomfort is subtle; it’s a barely noticeable unease, a jangling disharmony. If you’re healthy, fit and rested, there will be a point during the warmup where you’ll be able to pick up the pace without discomfort. You’ll rarely have to run the entire warmup at the same slow pace – as the body warms up, it will comfortably go faster.
Special case: You’ve probably had the experience of starting a run where your running shoes turned into wings. On days like that, you might need only 50 percent of your usual warmup time, or less. Who knows why? Sometimes it all comes together – you’re healthy and you feel great. On those days, I believe there’s absolutely no harm in going with the flow of positive energy.
At least three published training systems that I’m aware of are consistent with a gradual warmup, and an intuitive approach to reading the body’s signals. For fun, I’ll call them “Slow,” “Slower,” and “Slowest.”
First, however, it’s important to remember that “slow” is relative. David L. Costill, Ph.D., a world-renowned sports physiologist, once tested former marathon world record holder Derek Clayton (2:08:33) in his lab. Costill describes the experiment in his book, Running: The Athlete Within (p. 16):
When asked to run 10 km on the treadmill at a pace that equaled his best marathon pace (4 min: 53 s per mile), he [Clayton] was able to do it with apparent ease, carrying on a conversation with everyone in the laboratory. Nearing the end of the run we asked him if he could continue the run at that pace. He responded by saying, “Yeh, I can run another hour if you want me to.” Of course we thought he might be putting on a show for the other runners in the room, so we drew a blood sample from his arm immediately after the run to determine his lactate level, an indication of running effort. To our surprise, his blood lactate level was only 1.8 mmol/liter, a value one might expect to find in someone who had not been exercising. Nevertheless, when we calculated his oxygen use during the run it averaged over 85% of his VO2max….
This ability to exercise at a high percentage of one’s VO2max for long periods without accumulating lactic acid is not fully understood, though it appears that this quality is a function of the muscular adaptations during training.
Aside from the fact, mentioned in the Introduction, that the lactic acid theory of fatigue has been scientifically disproved, Clayton’s ability to hold a relaxed conversation at 4:53 pace is amazing. This is a guy you would not want to invite to go for a friendly jog.
Parenthetically, Clayton was very large for a marathoner. When he ran his 2:08:33 record, he weighed 162 pounds. Compare that figure to today’s world-class Africans, who average just 118 pounds. If Clayton had weighed 40 pounds less, it seems likely that the Africans would still be chasing his dust.
Costill notes, “Some of the best runners we have tested were able to run at 75 to 85% of VO2max during a marathon. [Alberto] Salazar, [Bill] Rodgers, and [Grete] Waitz were able to run rather comfortably for up to 30 min at 86 to 90% of their VO2max values. So champion runners might have a higher capacity for tolerating high levels of stress than those of us who run in the middle or back of the pack.”
Here are the most most successful slow, slower, and slowest training systems that I know of:
1. “Slow.” Because Joe Henderson was among the first and best-known advocates of slow training, he’s been unfairly blamed for a range of ills in US running, ranging from the decline in American performances at the Olympic level, to the newly respectable status of the four-hour marathon. These charges are completely unfounded. In over 45 years of writing about running, Henderson has never recommended that runners train only at “LSD” pace, except for basic fitness.
What Joe actually said, in his classic 1969 book, Long, Slow Distance: The Humane Way to Train, is that gifted competitive runners cannot hope to realize their full potential without hard speedwork. It’s also important to understand that, at the time Joe wrote his book, “long, slow distance” was considered to be anything slower than about 7:00 pace – not “10-minute pace and and slower,” as the term “LSD” has come to be defined today.
Joe also suggested, quite reasonably, that it might not make sense for a mid-pack runner to log 100-mile weeks and twice-weekly speedwork to lower his marathon PR from 3:20 to 2:59. Most grown-up runners have obligations that make running 15-20 hours a week a questionable proposition.
Frank Shorter said that if a talented runner will do two hard interval sessions and a long run weekly, and fill in with slow running for a total of 100 miles, and if he’ll stick to the program for two or three years, he’ll “get good.” That’s exactly the training Henderson recommended for talented runners in Long, Slow Distance. (Joe has graciously posted this long-out-of-print book on his website: www.joehenderson.com.)
Here’s how Joe defines long, slow distance:
My definition of “LSD” pace, from the time I first wrote about it more than 30 years ago, has been runs of one or more minutes per mile slower than current racing ability for the same distance. Refining that now, I’d say that adding one minute puts you at the dividing line between a moderate and a hard pace. Adding two minutes takes you to the line between moderate and easy.
During easy runs, Henderson recommends going “comfortably, not too fast or too slow.” Based on his experience coaching hundreds of beginning runners in his University of Oregon fitness classes, Joe says most people tend to settle in at about 1-1/2 minutes per mile slower than top speed. (As mentioned earlier, Frank Shorter did most of his slow training at 7:00 pace, yet he ran the marathon at 4:59 pace, a difference of two minutes per mile.)
2. “Slower.” In his book Training for Endurance, Philip Maffetone recommends running most of the time at “180-minus pace.” Subtract your age from 180. If you’ve been exercising at least four times a week for two years or more, use this figure as your maximum aerobic training heart rate. If you’ve been training regularly and competing for at least two years, add 5 beats. If you’re 65 or older, you can add up to 10 beats. If you’re 16 or under, Maffetone recommends training at a maximum heart rate of 165. These figures shouldn’t be rigidly adhered to; Maffetone suggests finding a comfortable pace near the 180-minus figure where your gait feels relaxed, natural and smooth.
Maffetone recommends spending many months training no faster than the slow, 180-minus pace, followed by 5-8 weeks of intense speedwork and racing before an important goal event. Over the weeks and months of slow running, your speed at the 180-minus heart rate should gradually get faster.
Many successful athletes have used Maffetone’s system, including six-time Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon winner Mark Allen, short-course triathlon world champion Mike Pigg, and Priscilla Welch, the world women’s masters marathon record holder (2:26:51 at age 41; Welch also won the New York City marathon at age 42).
3. “Slowest.” When John Douillard’s career as a professional triathlete stalled-out on traditional, high-stress, “pain-is-gain” training, he sought the advice of an expert in the ancient Indian healing art of Ayurveda. After reducing his mileage, changing his diet, getting more sleep, and spending time meditating, Douillard began finishing in the top three in his races. He later came across an ancient text that recommended that most exercise be done at just 50% of the body’s maximum capacity. Douillard chose to interpret this figure as 50% of maximum heart rate by the Karvonen formula.3
Because age-based formulas for maximum heart rate are notoriously inaccurate, Douillard recommends using the resulting “optimum training heart rate” as a starting point; the important thing is to exercise slightly below the level where the first, subtle feelings of “discomfort” begin. Douillard’s system relies on heart rate, breathing, and inner feelings of “comfort” to judge the body’s needs.
In a Douillard-style run, you begin by walking for a specified time (no longer than 5-10 minutes) that depends on your Ayurvedic body type. You then exercise at the 50% rate, while breathing through the nose and making a “Darth Vader” sound on exhalation, as described in the last chapter. (Comparable to saying “Aah!” as if blowing out a candle, while exhaling through the nose.)
After running at the 50% pace for a time also determined by your body type, you speed up tentatively and check your breathing and the sensation of comfort or discomfort. If you can run faster with complete comfort, while breathing slowly with a pause at the end of the out-breath, you can run as fast and as far as your legs will take you (until your breathing becomes labored again). Douillard cautions runners not to try this kind of training until basic fitness is achieved, using the methods described in his book.
A minor caveat about heart-rate training. During long runs, particularly on warm days, your heart rate will “drift” upward. It can be frustrating when the monitor “tells you” to slow to a crawl, yet you feel fine running faster. When my heart rate rises on a hot day, I suspect the “safe” aerobic heart-rate range rises also, since my breathing usually remains deep and relaxed at a higher-than-normal heart rate. It’s a different feeling when my heart rate soars because I’m actually running too fast. The tip-off is that my breathing becomes ragged and uncomfortable; there’s no mistaking those signals – it’s time to slow down.
Several other coaches have preached slow training, including Ernst Van Aaken, MD, coach of former world 2000-meter record holder and Olympic 5000-meter silver medalist Harald Norpoth of Germany. Van Aaken’s book, The Van Aaken Method, was translated and published by Runner’s World in the mid-1970s. It enjoyed considerable success, thanks in part to the endorsement of Joan Ullyot, MD, a prominent road and trail runner in San Francisco – but also because Van Aaken was an uncompromising advocate for women’s running. He sponsored the world’s first all-women’s marathon, held in his home town of Waldniel, Germany in September 1974.
Conclusions
It’s clear that slow training contributes to endurance and speed, but it won’t make you fast unless you’re running high mileage. Even if you’re running 100 miles per week, you’ll need speedwork to extract the last measure of your speed.
The question remains: what kind of slow (and fast) running is best?
From our brief survey of slow-running systems, it may seem valid to assume that any kind of slow running works about as well as another, so long as we’re doing enough of it and not just slogging along. Frank Shorter did 80-86% of his training at roughly 7:00 pace, which for him was quite easy. Noureddine Morceli, arguably the greatest middle-distance runner of all time, did plenty of slow running – and, incredibly, he did much of it at 10-minute pace. Ultramarathoner Ray Krolewicz raced the 100K distance (62.2 miles) at close to 6:00 pace, yet he ran all of his slow miles as “10’s or 11’s.” Of course, Morceli and Krolewicz trained very hard year-round also.
How slow should you go? How fast? How far?
It’s good to remember how training works. Training has two parts: we “push our edges” – make the body do a little more than it’s used to – and then we give it a chance to rest and recover. The body grows stronger when we rest, not while we’re running. And because each body is unique, it’s up to you to figure out the speed, distance, and rest that will make your body grow stronger and not tear it down. To do that, you’ll have to “nudge your edges” and continually check how you feel, during your runs and afterward.
Day by day, week by week, you must fine-tune your training until you reach a point where you deeply know how your own, individual body “likes” to run – the kind of running your body thrives on. How to know? When you’re training well, you’ll finish your runs feeling, as Arthur Lydiard put it, “pleasantly tired,” but never wholly spent. Training that results deep, prison-camp fatigue is your enemy.
The most important key to training well is finding that balance – knowing how much and how fast you can safely train, and how much rest you need. That’s why it’s extremely helpful to keep a training diary, and increase your training in small, regular increments. Without the steadying influence of the diary, the mind can all too easily rationalize the spontaneous urge to run too fast or far.
Take a tip from two of the greatest endurance athletes of all time, ultramarathoner Bruce Fordyce of South Africa, and triathlete Mark Allen. Fordyce won South Africa’s famed 53.8-mile Comrades Marathon eight years in a row, and the historic 52-mile London to Brighton race three times consecutively. Allen won the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon six times. Both were extremely careful when it came to planning their training and racing.
Fordyce believed in being cautious “to the point of paranoia”:
My training advice is going to be different…because I place my emphasis on rest and recovery. I do believe in hard training, but there is only so much hard training that the body can take, and the timing and duration of any hard training phase is very important. During the hard training phase, never be afraid to take a day off. If your legs are feeling unduly stiff and sore, rest; if you are at all sluggish, rest; in fact, if you doubt, rest.4
Like Fordyce, Mark Allen believed easy running played an indispensable role in his success. Dr. Timothy Noakes reports:
In a discussion I had with him in Pajalahti, Finland, Allen added that the key to his longevity was the three months of gentle aerobic training in the Patience Phase. His belief is that once you begin speed training, the body enters a hyped-up state that wears you down, as you are unable to sleep properly and recover adequately during this period. Thus, in his opinion, intensive training produces a cumulative fatiguing effect, which is not due solely to the actual training performed but also to a residual effect that acts during the recovery period between training sessions.5
When Noakes asked Allen why more triathletes weren’t using the methods that had brought him so much success, “Allen answered that many athletes are too ego-driven. They can’t wait to perform well and will not accept anyone else’s ideas.”
The body changes slowly. It takes at least two weeks for the body to adapt after a single hard training session. That’s how long the body requires to synthesize proteins and build new tissue in response to the hard workout. Runners who try to force their bodies to “change faster,” only succeed in overloading their body’s natural regenerative processes, with the result that they become overtrained and have to take time off, delaying their improvement.
In this book, I talk about the value of learning to calmly, dispassionately feel what your body needs, moment by moment. Intuition – calm feeling – can help you make better decisions and tap into a higher intelligence that is aware of all the factors in your training and your life. That higher wisdom wants essentially just one thing for you: it wants to help you find greater happiness.
If developing your ability to run fast will expand your awareness and bring you more joy, your inner guidance will surely help you “get faster,” and get it right.
In that connection, I must issue a WARNING: If the long, slow warmup becomes deadening drudgery, you can know for certain that it’s wrong. You should never have to do anything in your training that kills joy – for example, ploddingly following a set of “rules”: “I must run 45 minutes at 65% of MHR.” Surely, you’ll need patience in the beginning, especially if you aren’t used to a long warmup. But the result should always be a feeling of joy. The greatest joy comes with high energy. And it can be hard to feel energized if you’re slogging all the time. In the chapters ahead, I’ll present a case for doing most running, after a decent warmup, at a fairly high aerobic pace, as advocated by Arthur Lydiard.
I’m skeptical of training systems, Like Phil Maffetone’s that are based on fixed heart-rate formulas. The problem is, they seem to work well for runners who’ve been training intensely for years, but not nearly as well for those who are less fit going into the program. The first group are able to train at a reasonably brisk pace at the target heart rate, while the second group end up slogging.
I suspect that rigid, age-based formulas like Maffetone’s work very well only for the fraction of runners for whom the prescribed heart rate corresponds to a pace that improves aerobic fitness. For elites like Mark Allen, who’ve trained at a very high level for decades, the slow “MAF” heart rate may correspond to a higher level of aerobic function than for less-well-conditioned runners.
Going into the Maffetone program, Allen was chronically overtrained. It’s hardly surprising that logging months at a relatively slow pace revived his career.
Once an athlete has trained hard enough to raise his VO2Max as high as possible, it takes a very long time to lose it. For years after Peter Snell retired from active competition, he scored roughly the same VO2Max numbers, even though he had lost a great deal of general fitness. A few months of moderate-paced running will not deteriorate VO2Max.
Runners who enter the Maffetone program without ever having trained long and hard may not improve at all. For them, the “180-Minus” formula results in a running pace that doesn’t stimulate aerobic fitness.
Several years ago, I did all my running for six months at the “180-minus” pace, and my aerobic fitness failed to improve; that is, my pace at the “maximum aerobic function” heart rate got no faster, as Maffetone promised. I’m convinced it’s because I’d been training at a slow pace for years.
If you follow the online discussions of Maffetone’s program – and they are endless – you’re likely to find the participants divided into two groups: those for whom it worked well, and those for whom it didn’t work at all, or minimally.
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, your heart will occasionally give you an “okay” to run fast, perhaps even after a very short warmup. On days when you feel stale, without enthusiasm for a long warmup, try jogging for 10-15 minutes to warm up your muscles, then pick up the pace tentatively. If your body is ill, overtrained, or tired, there will be a definite, physical feeling of reluctance – like dragging a heavy sandbag. That’s your body’s way of saying “No!” But if you’re merely in a funk, the speed burst may be liberating – you’ll feel eager to “do it again.”
Fast running is important, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. A long, slow run nurtures joys of one kind, but fast running delivers pleasures of an entirely different order – it’s the joy of refreshing your body, heart, will, mind, and soul in a stream of high energy.
I don’t believe a long warmup interferes with developing speed and endurance. Physically, it prepares the body to run efficiently. With its systems properly “greased,” the body can work more efficiently; so it can get more out of long runs and speedwork, which may feel almost effortless. Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, the long warmup can give you time to attune yourself to the “still, small voice” of intuition. All of the coaches and elites I’ve quoted in this chapter advocate some fast training, without exception. Slow and fast running are both necessary. Recent studies show that doing some fast running delays age-related loss of fitness more effectively than pure slow running.
1 Spencer MR, Gastin PB. Energy system contribution during 200- to 1500-m running in highly trained athletes. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2001 Jan;33(1):157-62.
2 Parker, John. L., Jr. Heart Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot. Tallahassee, FL: Cedarwinds Publishing, 1998. 41-42.
3 (Maximum heart rate) minus (resting heart rate), divided by 2, plus resting heart rate. Douillard adjusts the formula: (220 minus age plus resting heart rate) divided by 2.
4Noakes, Lore of Running, 4th ed., p. 453
5Noakes, Lore of Running, 4th ed., p. 460
