What matters is only the internal stress on the body, so lactate levels are measured repeatedly throughout the workout with a finger or ear prick to ensure that they stay in the desired range. The key point about the threshold intervals is that they’re not run to any external benchmark like pace. Tuesdays and Thursdays both include threshold intervals in the mornings and evenings, and Saturdays see a more intense workout, such as 20 x 200-meter hill sprints. A typical training week, according to the paper, involves a total of about 110 miles of mostly easy running. The new bit is the lactate-guided threshold interval training. But the basic idea-a lot of easy miles and few hard ones to maximize the overall stimulus of various types of adaptation-is widely accepted. There’s an ongoing debate about the nomenclature, and about whether elite athletes do polarized training or a related concept called pyramidal training. It basically means doing a lot of easy running and just a small amount of intense training, along the lines of what’s sometimes referred to as polarized training. Instead of “Norwegian model,” the title of the paper refers to “lactate-guided threshold interval training within a high-volume low-intensity approach.” The second element, the high-volume low-intensity bit, is not particularly novel. Last year Bakken published a detailed manifesto on his website laying out the history of the training model and reproducing email and text exchanges with Gjert to demonstrate the transfer of knowledge.) (That claim is not without controversy: Gjert Ingebrigtsen, Jakob’s father and former coach, has minimized the importance of Bakken’s influence. Co-authors are scientists Carl Foster and Leif Inge Tjelta, both influential training theorists, and Marius Bakken, a former Norwegian 5,000-meter star who is credited with developing and popularizing the approach. The lead author is Arturo Casado, a former Olympic miler from Spain. To that end, a new review paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ( freely available to read) takes a stab at laying out the science of the Norwegian model. It’s enough, at least, to make me curious about what it’s all about. There’s nothing new about success begetting imitation, but what has caught my attention is the anecdotal reports I’ve heard from other athletes who’ve tried switching to the Norwegian model and are convinced it really works. Its most famous current proponents are the Ingebrigtsen brothers, including Olympic 1,500 champion Jakob, as well as Olympic triathlon champion Kristian Blummenfelt and Ironman world champion Gustav Iden. Still, I can’t help being impressed with the rapid spread of what’s becoming known as the “Norwegian model” of endurance training. The wheel gets reinvented on a regular basis, but it’s still a wheel. There are many different ways of organizing your training in order to accumulate as much of this stress as possible, while allowing enough recovery between sessions. Endurance training involves stressing your cardiovascular system, metabolism, and muscles in a way that spurs them to adapt. Give them springy shoes, an all-weather track surface, pacing lights, and maybe a little prize money, and all of them (Clarke in particular) would still be world-class today.Īll of this is to say that I’m not a big believer in magic workouts or secret training plans. Clarke was farther back, but went on to break the world record the next year. So which approach worked best? Schul, Norpoth, and Dellinger took the medals, separated by a mere second. “Any variation,” according to Fred Wilt’s book How They Train, “ unintentional.” Ron Clarke did what we would think of as threshold training-long, moderately hard runs of between three and 14 miles-up to three times a day, every day. Bill Dellinger was guided by University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman, whose guiding principle was alternating hard days with easy days, a mixed approach that remains overwhelmingly popular today. Harald Norpoth was the most famous disciple of German coach Ernst Van Aaken, who advocated a diet of almost exclusively “long slow distance,” or LSD. Bob Schul trained under Hungarian coach Mihály Iglói, running almost nothing but short intervals on the track, usually twice a day. If I had an Etsy shop, the catchphrase on all my merch would be “Everything I know about endurance training I learned from the 1964 Olympic 5,000-meter final.” As Mayo Clinic physiologist Michael Joyner pointed out a few years ago, it was a clash of vastly different training approaches:
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