A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I tested out the training plans for Marathon Excellence for Everyone with the help of a large group of “beta testers” from this very email list. Monitoring the training of these beta testers helped me fine-tune and improve the training plans in the book before it was released.
Today I want to showcase two workouts that I removed from the training plans after the beta testing rounds and explain why I cut them from the final schedules.
It’s not because they’re bad workouts—they’re great sessions! But I removed them because they were asking too much of the athlete early on in training. Not so much from a difficulty perspective, but in terms of psychological buy-in and in terms of precise pacing skills.
(Note that both workouts are “General Phase” workouts, meaning they’re useful for building fitness across a wide range of events, so they use 5k pace as the basis for pacing—the training plans transition to percentages of marathon pace when the general phase ends.)
Workout 1: Fast continuous run
📅 Workout: 6 km continuous at 95% 5k pace
In our current era of “all intervals all the time,” I think continuous runs are highly underrated. This workout in particular—a fast continuous run—is something that I virtually never see in a runner’s schedule, at least in the United States. For that reason alone, you’d expect it to have a good fitness benefit (simply by being a new stimulus).
Early versions of the Marathon Excellence plans used this workout during the general phase as a complement to more classic 8k/10k interval workouts like 8 x 1k or 5 x 1 mi at 95% 5k pace. This pace works out to 8k to 10k race pace, or pretty close to “CV pace” (a.k.a. critical speed) if you follow a Tinman-style or power-based approach (Stryd, etc).
I often like using a combination of fast continuous runs and interval workouts when it makes sense at a given pace, since each type of workout has complementary benefits: continuous runs are more specific to racing and give you a more potent stimulus per unit volume, while intervals let you average a faster pace for a given amount of volume (because of the recovery interval).
The problem with the fast continuous run
The fact that most runners never do anything resembling this workout means that putting it on the schedule requires some significant buy-in from the athlete. Early on in training, a strange new workout like this is asking a lot, especially when you aren’t far enough into training to really see a difference.
The problem is amplified by the fact that people are going to look at the whole training calendar from the start—even people who haven’t decided whether to start the program at all! (The PDF overviews are online, after all).
Many beta testers really enjoyed this workout after they were done with it, but a lot were pretty intimidated by it beforehand. I’m okay with some level of intimidation, but most people have a limited “mental budget” for diving into a session that looks tough on paper. I would rather save that mental budget for the most important new workouts—long fast runs and marathon-specific intervals with floating recovery.
Workout 2: Short fast run + hills
📅 Workout: 4 km at 98% 5k pace, 4 min rest, then 6–8 x 1 min at 105% 5k effort up a moderate hill w/ easy walk down
This fast continuous run pushes the envelope even more when it comes to doing a continuous complement to intervals. Many runners will do 600s, 800s, or 1000s at 5k pace, but few will ever run a fast continuous session like this at a pace very close to 5k pace.
Again, a new stimulus = big potential benefit. And in the case of this workout, you can accomplish a lot with very little volume, making it a great session for low to moderate-mileage schedules.
Adding some fast uphill repeats at the end helps improve metabolic power output from all muscle fibers, without pushing too hard into fatigue (since the hill essentially mandates a long recovery period, because you have to get back down to the start).
The problem with the short fast run + hills
The issue with this workout was (a) it was also “intimidating on paper” just like the 6k fast continuous run, but also (b) it requires a pretty accurate sense of your current 5k fitness and good pacing skills—otherwise you’re just doing 4k at 100% of 5k pace, which is going to be “9/10 difficulty” or higher.
This session ended up being too hard for some testers, especially if they got out a little bit too fast at the beginning, or if they were not sure about their current fitness level. Another issue was the hills: not everyone has a good route that allows you to run a flat, fast 4k, then follow it up by short hill repeats.
(One fun side-note: a version of this workout survives as part of the evening session to the “special block” in Week 9 of the Hurricane plan, the toughest training plan in the book!)
Using the right workout for the right job
Making a schedule that an athlete is going to approach “all at once” requires a slightly different approach than you’d take with one-on-one coaching, where it’s much easier to sidestep all of the issues above.
In a one-on-one setting, I have a lot more buy-in from the athlete, and I don’t necessarily have to “reveal” the toughest workouts in advance (or even decide on them at all – we can change training incrementally and see how the athlete adapts, physically and psychologically). And if an athlete is not very good at pacing yet, I can just have them not do the workout at all!
I can also reduce the psychological load by making the workout effort-based. For example, “20 minutes at 10k cross country effort, through rolling hills on grass”, which is much easier mentally than 6k on the road (or on the track) at 95% 5k pace.
I do use these sessions in my one-on-one coaching (you’ll see variants of both workouts make an appearance in the schedule for “Athlete A” in my article on sub-70 half-marathon training, for example).
The need to use the right workout for the right situation was one of my most important takeaways from the beta testing of the Marathon Excellence plans.
Even when training the same person for the same event, you need to approach a “one-shot schedule” differently than a recurring schedule you can tweak, adjust, and update.
So, there’s more to good training than just “what looks best on paper.” You also need to consider factors like whether the athlete is likely to have a successful experience with the workout and whether the workout is creating the psychological effect that you want—before, during, and after the session.
Learn more about modern marathon training
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As I mentioned above, my new book Marathon Excellence for Everyone is now available worldwide. You can get it here on Amazon, and if you live outside the United States, you can get the Metric Edition in your local marketplace here.
If you're not training for the marathon, you might enjoy my 2013 book, Modern Training & Physiology, which is a short and simple overview of scientifically based training for the 800m to the 10k.
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