10k

Two workouts that aren’t in Marathon Excellence

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.

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New web app: a fast and simple race pace calculator for runners

screenshot of a race pace calculator for runners from running writings

I just launched a new web app: a simple and fast race-pace calculator!

🏃‍♀️ Try out my new race pace calculator here! 🏃‍♂️

After crunching pace-to-race and race-to-pace calculations by hand for about the millionth time, I decided I needed a fast and easy way to quickly play around with different paces and target race times.

There are tons of race pace calculators out there on the internet already, but I wasn’t happy with any of them. Often I want to quickly iterate on different paces or race times, or toggle back and forth between goal time and goal pace.

For example, if a runner I’m coaching has done some workouts that suggest their marathon pace might be around 6:55–6:48/mi, I often do something like this:

How fast is 6:55/mi for the marathon? It's 3:01:21. What about 6:48/mi? That's 2:58:17. It’d be nice to get under 3:00, how fast is that? It’s 6:52/mi. Is that 6:52 exactly? No it's actually 6:51.9. Ok, let's try some workouts in the next few weeks around 6:51-6:49/mi and see how that pace range feels.

With other race pace calculators, this iteration was just too slow. So, I built this calculator to make it fast and easy to play around like this, even on your smartphone.

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Percy Cerutty’s training philosophy for distance runners, 50 years on

Fifty years ago, on August 14, 1975, the great Australian coach Percy Cerutty passed away in Portsea, Australia—the same sandy, windswept coastal town where he trained some of Australia’s top middle distance runners in the 1950s and 1960s.

Cerutty was best-known for the accomplishments of his coaching charges John Landy and Herb Elliott—Landy being the second person to break four minutes in the mile and a bronze medalist at 1500m at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and Herb Elliott being the greatest miler of his day, who at age 22 was Olympic champion, Commonwealth champion, and world-record holder in the mile (3:54.5) and 1500m (3:35.6).

Cerutty also had a longstanding coaching rivalry with New Zealander Arthur Lydiard, whose name would become synonymous with high-mileage training during the 1960s.

Perhaps because Cerutty intentionally eschewed narrowly “systematic” approaches to training, there’s very little discussion of “Cerutty-style” training the way you hear runners discussing “Lydiard-style” training. Cerutty left behind no pre-written workout template, no system of formulas, and little in the way of universal dictums for training.[1] He did, however, leave behind quite a lot of writing.

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Individual variation in aerobic and anaerobic energy contributions to different events

Fast-twitch Frannie and Slow-twitch Sallie face off in an ultimate battle to discover who is truly the queen of the mile

Many books on training and exercise physiology (including mine) begin with a discussion of aerobic and anaerobic energy production. The next logical question to ask is how much these two energy systems contribute to the various running events—how “aerobic” is, say, the 800m? Such a question is sure to spark heated debate online, but I have always been skeptical of such figures, for two reasons.

First, some of the methods that were traditionally used to come up with the aerobic vs. anaerobic contribution to a particular event have not held up to scrutiny.

Take the concept of “oxygen debt”—the idea that you could measure anaerobic energy expenditure by measuring post-exercise oxygen consumption, as your body “paid” for its anaerobic energy production. This concept was known to be shaky as early as 1984, and though later research has improved on the accuracy of these metrics considerably, many of the papers that coaches and training books cite do not use these modern, improved methods.

Second, I have a broader disagreement with the search for one number: to say, for example that the 800m is “65% aerobic” (as Joe Vigil’s book does) or ~50% (as Coe/Martin’s book does) glosses over the fact that there is tremendous individual variation in how much aerobic versus anaerobic energy goes into a given event.[1]

In fact, that range of variation looks like this:

Event % Anaerobic (range for nine out of ten runners)
800m 15–33%
1000m 10–25%
1500m / mile 8–20%
3000m / 2 miles 4–10%
5000m 3–6%
10,000m 2–4%

Where do these numbers come from? Read on to find out!

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Building a full-spectrum percentage-based 10k training plan from scratch

I’ve written a lot about what I’m now calling full-spectrum training, i.e. percentage-based training in the style of Renato Canova and other members of the “Italian School” of training.

We can talk theory all day, but sometimes it helps to see what building a real schedule looks like from the ground up. To that end, I recently received the following email, lightly edited and anonymized:

I’ve just recently came across your website while looking into Canova-type training and have read a few other topics that you have delved into in great detail!

The last few years I really got into strict Lydiard-type training and while I found this training has really helped me, I think I am at a stage where I need to start looking at different types of training techniques. Hence I came across Canova or percentage type training.

I believe percentage-based training has helped me, but am probably struggling to write a plan for myself. I am looking to aim for a 10 km and want to see if you can give me any guidance on how to structure my training for it. I am keen to get a grip of this myself so I know how to write a plan up for various distances.

I started typing out a response, and quickly realized that it would work better as a full article, since I get a lot of questions like this.

So, here it is: a guide to building a 10k training program from scratch, using the full-spectrum percentage-based approach. This isn’t “the” way to train for the 10k, but it is a way, and one that is in keeping with the modern, full-spectrum, percentage-based approach.

This is also not “the Canova method,” but my method, one that’s certainly been influenced by Canova’s approach, but that also has some important differences and other influences as well.

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The science of running in super spikes: New data on Nike, Adidas, and PUMA track shoes

Lab scientist holding a prototype track and field super spike

Super spikes are track spikes for middle and long distance events that use the two key innovations in shoe tech that have revolutionized marathon shoes: “super foam” with high deformation and excellent energy return, and carbon fiber plates in the midsole.

I have a longer and more detailed article in the works that takes a deep dive into the biomechanics of super shoes more generally, but I wanted to get this post out since it’s track season and people want to run fast!

The impetus for this post was a fascinating new preprint on the benefits of super spikes from a multi-site collaboration involving research labs in Spain, the US, and Canada. The focus of the study is middle distance performance in super spikes versus traditional spikes.

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A comprehensive overview of Canova-style "full-spectrum" percentage-based training for runners

Percentage-based training, or as I've recently taken to calling it, full-spectrum training, is a mathematical approach to planning workouts for runners. Percentage-based methods are used by many top international coaches, most notably Renato Canova, to train runners at distances from 800m to the marathon. 

I could write a whole book about percentage-based training for runners (in fact, I did write a whole book on full-spectrum percentage-based marathon training), but the goal of this post is to give a clear, comprehensive, and readable overview of percentage-based training as a system—a set of principles that can be used to guide training decisions.

To this end, we’re going to focus on the concepts and rationale behind the percentage-based training method, as opposed to exact training calendars. This post does include an appendix with recommended workouts for every event from 800m to the marathon (even the 3k!), but event-specific full training calendars will be a project for another day.

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Check out my new book on marathon training!