If I had an Etsy shop, the tagline for all of my products would be “Everything I know about endurance training from the 1964 Olympic 5,000m final.”as Mayo Clinic Physiologist Michael Joyner pointed out a few years agoit was a clash of very different training approaches:
– Bob Schul trained under Hungarian coach Mihaj Iglo and would typically run twice a day in short intervals on the track doing very little.
– Harald Norpos was the most famous disciple of German coach Ernst van Aken, who almost exclusively advocated the “Long Slow Distance” or LSD diet.
– Bill Dillinger was mentored by Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon. His guiding principle was to alternate hard and easy days. This is still by far the most popular mixed approach today.
– Ron Clarke did what is considered threshold training, running moderately hard long runs of 3 to 14 miles daily, up to three times a day. According to Fred Wilt, “all variations” training method,”[was] Not intentionally.
So which approach worked best? Schul, Norpoth and Dellinger won the medals by just one second. Clark fell further back, but broke his world record the following year. Give it bouncy shoes, an all-weather surface, pacing his lights, and perhaps a small prize money, all of them (Clark in particular) are still world-class today.
All of this makes me less of a believer in magic training or secret training plans. There are different ways to organize your workouts to accumulate as much of this stress as possible while still allowing adequate recovery for your body. The wheel is regularly reinvented, but it’s still a wheel.
Still, I can’t help but be impressed by the rapid spread of what has come to be known as the ‘Norwegian model’ of endurance training. Its most famous current supporters are the Ingebrigtsen brothers, including Olympic 1,500 champion Jakob, his Olympic triathlete champion Christian Blumenfeld, and Ironman world champion Gustav his Iden. There’s nothing new about success creating imitation, but what caught my attention was an anecdotal story I heard from other athletes who tried switching to the Norwegian model and were convinced it really worked. At least enough to get you interested in what it is.
To that end, a new review article International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (freely viewable) challenges the scientific development of the Norwegian model. The lead author is Arturo Casado, a former Olympian his miler from Spain. Co-authors are scientists Karl Foster and Leif Inge Certa, both influential training theorists and former Norwegian 5,000m stars, who have contributed to the development and popularization of this approach. This is Marius Bakken. (This claim is not without controversy: Jakob’s father and former coach Gerd Ingebrigtsen has minimized the significance of Bakken’s influence. detailed manifest On his website, he describes the history of training models and reproduces email and text exchanges with Gjert to demonstrate knowledge transfer. )
The title of this paper refers to “Lactate-Induced Threshold Interval Training within a High-Volume Low-Intensity Approach” rather than to the “Norwegian Model”. The second factor, the large amount of low-intensity bits, is nothing new. It basically means doing lots of easy runs and small amounts of intense training along what is sometimes called polarized training. Or a related concept called pyramidal training continues to be debated. The basic idea is widely accepted.
A new bit is lactate-induced threshold interval training. According to the paper, a typical training week includes about 110 miles of mostly easy running in total.Both Tuesday and Thursday include morning threshold intervals and In the evening, on Saturday, more intense training takes place, including a 20 x 200 meter hill sprint.
An important point about threshold intervals is that they are not subject to external benchmarks such as pace. Since it’s only the internal stress on the body that matters, you can repeatedly measure your lactate level by pricking your finger or ear during your workout to make sure your lactate level stays within the desired range. “threshold”. More precisely, between the 1st and His 2nd lactate thresholds, corresponding to lactate levels of 2.0-4.5 mmol/L. Bakken himself got the best results by keeping his lactic acid below 3.0 mmol/L.
why this range? As soon as the second lactate threshold is crossed, or the nearly equivalent critical speed is crossed, the time required to recover from exercise increases dramatically. 1 study Fatigue was found to be 4–5 times greater with exercise 10% above the critical threshold than with exercise 10% below. So by carefully keeping it below that threshold, you can accumulate much more training time with enough intensity to encourage useful adaptations.In fact, once in the morning and once at night. You can recover quickly enough to do one session in 2 days and you can do the same thing 2 days later.
Another important feature is that the threshold session is divided into intervals. If you simply do continuous threshold running, your speed should be kept relatively low to avoid building up lactate levels. It can trigger more race-specific muscle adaptations without accumulating too much fatigue. It minimizes surges and makes it easier to do a lactate test.
In the sample training week provided with this paper, the four threshold interval workouts are:
– Tuesday morning: 5 x 6:00 at 2.5 mmol/L, 1:00 recovery
-Tuesday night: 10 x 1,000 meters, 3.5 mmol/L, 1:00 recovery
– Thursday morning: 5 x 2,000 meters, 2.5 mmol/L, 1:00 recovery
– Thursday night: 25 x 400 meters, 3.5 mmol/L, 0:30 recovery
In the final workout, he reported observing a “world-class long-distance runner” running 400-meter reps in 64 seconds while keeping lactate levels below 4.0 mmol/L. This puts him slightly above his 4:16 mph pace, which is considerably faster than we normally think of as a “threshold” even for top runners. But with the interval structure, it won’t be too painful to recover. According to anecdotal reports I’ve heard, runners accustomed to doing interval training with the Hammer really struggle to get comfortable enough with these sessions, especially in the beginning. In between, the pace you can maintain without spiking your lactate levels is dramatically faster.
There are many more nuances to implementing the Norwegian model, such as how to adjust training as the big race approaches. Casado’s paper and Bakken’s manifestoBut these double-threshold days, divided into intervals with tightly controlled lactate levels, are a standout factor. I conclude with a call for proper research to see if they are superior. The test will be the 2024 Olympics to see if the battle of training strategies will yield more decisive results than the 1964 Olympics.
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