Transcript
0:00 How should you train as an amateur? That's right. We're not going to talk about elites and all their 100 miles a week. We're going to talk about amateur training. This is one of my most requested subjects. So, let's dive into it. What do you do if you're constrained to maybe 30 to 40 or 50 miles a week at max like most regular day people? Most of the training including mine and my books and here talks about what the elites do. Can we tailor that to the everyday individual?
0:36 We can take some of the principles. Okay, principles still apply. It's coming from someone who got a start in high school coaching where you take a random new person coming out of PE and have to get them ready for cross country. My high school coaches know how to do this. The principles still apply, but there's some key caveats and nuance. And I think this is really important because whenever I post something on my Instagram that says, "Hey, Frank Shorter said to do this." I get tons of comments that say, "Oh, but how can I take what Frank Shorter said and apply it to mine?" That's That doesn't work.
1:10 Here's the answer to that. So, let's start. Amateur scaling training 30 to 50 miles a week. Step one is understanding what's your limiting factor to training more. Cuz I'm going to be blunt with you. Okay? In the longer events, half marathon, 10K, marathon, the easiest and best and often limiting factor for most people is mileage. If you look at the average 3-hour-ish marathoner in the US, they run about 40 miles a week. You're not running your best marathon off 40 miles a week. It's just not true. So, the mileage is the limiting factor. But underneath that is a reason for why amateurs can't do more mileage. Often things like time, stress with work and life and all that, injury risk which contributes or takes in from stress, all of these things, lifestyle, all of these things play into effect here.
2:10 And I want you to be realistic here because that directs what place you go. Maybe the your older kids are out of the house, you got time, but it's injury risk. So, in that case, what we do is we'd say, "Okay, great. You can only run 40 miles a week, 35." We're going to add in some cross-training to try and get some of that volume effect, some swimming, aqua jogging, biking, elliptigo, whatever it is your choice is, arc trainer. We're going to do that. But, for most people, I would argue it's lifestyle and time.
2:45 Where we just don't have the time to dedicate to that. And if that's the case, well, that's a kind of a hard constraint. We can't cross-train our way out of that. Which leads me to the second point that is really important for amateurs. What are your your strengths and weaknesses and your limiting factor in terms of performance or physiology? What do I mean by this? I mean, what's your kink in the pipe? If you're training for a 5K or 10K or marathon, what's the thing that is preventing you from getting to that spot?
3:17 Maybe you have really good endurance, but you just don't have the speed anymore for the 5K. Or maybe it's vice versa, like you come from a team sport background and you've got good speed, but that endurance just isn't there, that aerobic ability isn't there. You've got to understand this first before we think of what kind of training to do. Why? Again, to use myself as example, once I got into coaching, kept training a little bit at a high end, but once I stopped training that hard and did 30-ish to 40 miles a week, I still had a really aerobic system because of decades of running.
3:56 So, I could tap into that really quickly. Which meant my limiting factor for most things wasn't my aerobic system because I could just kind of do a couple threshold workouts, bump that up, at least for a while. It was more of the specific stuff where I had to get used to running relatively fast for you know, longer intervals and things like that. Those mile repeats, K's, 800s, 400s, what what have you. So, for me coming on to maintenance mode, I just did some aerobic stuff that kind of touched things up and then like reminded my body what it was like to hurt and feel fast again.
4:33 And ran really well. Now, as time has gone away and I didn't I'm further from that 80, 90, 100 miles a week Steve, it takes more to to kind of maintain that aerobic system. So, the point is step one is the self-assessment. There is no magic training plan out for anybody. Assess yourself, okay? That is number one. Now, given that caveat, I'm going to just go with some assumptions. So, we're going to kind of create like average Joe amateur.
5:02 And if we look at average Joe amateur who has time constraints, here's the deal. Most of you are aerobically limited because you didn't spend decades doing 100 miles a week and just coming off of that. Like, you're aerobically limited because the aerobic system takes a long time to develop. We know this. We know this from research and from practice. So, step one, I think, is when we look at for any amateur, but especially if you're aerobically limited, is we got to build that base and foundation. And this is where elite training and more so college and high school training really does help us.
5:40 Lydiard told us decades ago, like, "Hey, you got to have the base first, even for the high-level athletes." That applies even more so for the amateur. Why? Because if we look at amateurs, what often gets in the way it's like injury that occurs through rapid changes in volume, intensity, or stress load. Meaning, we're not prepared for what we get thrown into. The way to prepare is to lay a foundation. Now, most of that is going to be aerobic.
6:13 But also part of that, especially depending on your age and your background, is going to be muscular or muscular tendon or neuromuscular. Meaning, we've got to get ready for the skill of running so that you can handle the more intense stuff. So, it's not just getting used to the volume, it's also getting used to the skill of running. So, we need to have a prolonged period. How long it lasts depends on the individual. Could be weeks, you know, 6 to 8 weeks, could be months.
6:44 And all honesty for most people, probably the longer-ish the better to build a foundation, but I understand you want to get to your goals. So, you don't always have time. What does foundation look like? Gradually increasing the volume of runs. Okay? But, it also includes getting that neuromuscular system ready, which is simple and what we'll talk about or straightforward what we'll talk about in a second. But first I want to cover that aerobic system. Whether we're talking about 30, 40, 50 miles a week, whatever your limiting factor is, that will kind of decide like your density of training. Meaning, how many days a week you're going to train, whether that's four, five, six, even seven to get that volume. That depends on you and your lifestyle.
7:27 But, what I like to suggest to people is we want to get most of those runs that we're doing, whether it's three to seven days a week, in the 45 to 60-minute range. Why? Because that's where most of the bang for our buck for aerobic adaptations comes from. If we can get up to 45 plus minutes, that accumulated volume is going to have a bigger effect. So, what does that mean for you? If you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to run 7 days a week and, you know, 20 to 30 minutes each day." What I would say is like, "Okay, that's fine if that fits your lifestyle." But probably a better bang for our buck is to take that total time if you can and shorten it to 5 days a week and lengthen out those runs so they get Again, I can't do that math in my head, but hopefully to 40 to 45 minutes plus, you're going to have bigger bang for your buck here. Okay?
8:18 So, that's step one is how do we increase our volume of training so that we're getting more total easy steady runs in the 45-minute plus range. In addition to that, what we're looking at is including things, and this can be included on some of those easy easy runs afterwards, in the middle of, whatever. It has you done matter to me. We start with strides. Pick 100 m, stride it out. Call it feel good fast. You're not going crazy fast, you're not sprinting. You're learning the skill of running, which is just turning over a little bit, going a little bit faster, recruiting some fast-twitch fibers, getting your muscles and tendons to, you know, deal with the impact of the ground at those higher intensities and absorb that energy, and tendons to deal with it. And you're saying, "Hey, I'm you got to adapt here."
9:09 And that's what we're doing. Okay? Eventually, what I want to take that from strides into maybe something a little bit longer like some pickups, 45-second minute pickups, or some 200s on the track. But again, during this base phase, all we're looking at is feel good fast. How often? Strides maybe 2 days a week will be enough for most amateur. Okay? If we're doing a full-blown kind of feel good fast workout, honestly, 1 day a week will be good enough. We could also do these as hills and add that strength component, one of the best strength training kind of things you can do. And go a little bit faster, but the key here on all of this is feel good fast, meaning the goal is not to get tired, is not to get fatigued.
9:55 It's to learn the skill of running. That's the base. How does it? Do that for a while. Now, once we transition to that, we're saying, "Hey, I've built this up." Okay? I've got this skill development. And I'm not going to cover fully strength training in here, but if you want it in there, it often helps with injury prevention and skill development. That's fine. I'm going to do a video eventually. I've been putting together, but it just takes a while. So, strength training will leave to the side.
10:24 But for running specific training, we got the base. Okay? Easy plus some feel good fast. Now, we get into what I call the training for an event phase. And this comes down to that kink in the pipe for your physiology plus what are you training for? Okay, those things combine. Okay, or is it for a marathon or a 5K? Like, that's going to change the different approaches, obviously. I can't cover everything all at once. I'll do specific distances in different videos as we come along for this stuff. But what we're essentially doing is and I'll try and cover some of them in this, but essentially what we're saying is, "Okay, we built the foundation.
11:07 Now, I want to stress the system a little bit more to cover those those speed and endurance side depending on the race and what I bring to the table in terms of my own strengths and weaknesses. I think when it comes to aerobic side, what we're doing is we're saying, "What is the biggest aerobic bang for our buck?" And here, after having had Marius backen on and talked about Norwegian training and threshold training, our biggest bang for our buck is then getting into what I'd call the high-end aerobic kind of intensities, or what, you know, Marius would say that kind of, you know, 2.3 to three-ish millimoles of lactate, which is the technical side of just like just a little bit under threshold. Why just a little bit under threshold? It's safer for an amateur. You're not going to mess it up as well.
12:03 For me, for amateurs, this starts one day a week. We take our strides, we still have them one day a week or something else, and we say, "Hey, one day a week I'm going to go out and do some sort of high-end aerobic work." You start at about 15 minutes total for most amateurs. If you're not used to this, and gradually increase to where you're doing 25 to 30 minutes total, with warm-up and cool-down, you know, that isn't included in that.
12:29 You're gradually increasing where you're doing 25 to 30 minutes. Now, this isn't a go run 30 minutes at this sub-threshold and feel good about it. You can split it up. And honestly, you can split it up however you want. It does not really matter too much. You can do it traditional threshold style and go, you know, 15 minutes, then 10 minutes, or something like that. You can do it short fartlek style, 10 by 3 minutes, with a shorter recovery. The real key here, you can do it a progression run style, where we might do 30 minutes total, but start at marathon pace and then work down into that kind of higher-end aerobics side.
13:09 All of those are are viable options. Is one better than another? Maybe, depending on the person, but in general, the key is just accumulate that that volume in that space. And that's it, in a safe way. We generally want to start off with one of those a week. And then depending on your race goals, we'll often include, you know, two sometimes two sometimes a week or sometimes, you know, three every 2 weeks, meaning we're kind of increasing the density there. any more than that, again, Norwegian stuff tells you you can do more. I understand that. I can get that totally. I'm just giving my opinion on on this. For most amateurs, I would say like hang out in the that two week and if you're going more than that, you know, you're risking a little a little bit of overtraining, other stuff, injury risk, all that stuff unless it's very controlled.
14:13 So, we've got this aerobic side. Okay? That's the key. But at the same time, depending on your race, what I'd also like to do is take some of those strides or hundreds and extend them out into feel good fast work that is actual workouts here. Now, the key here is this is we're going to do more of this stuff if we're training for something shorter. Mile, 3K, 5K, even up to 10K. The longer we're training, half marathon, marathon, stuff like that, 10 miles, we're going to say, "Hey, this is more maintenance work." Okay?
14:53 Meaning it's not quite as important. We're going to lean into that aerobic development even more so. So, a lot of this depends on where you fall in, what in the world are you training for? I'm going to explain it, you know, without getting into specifics of this is for the 5K or this is for the marathon. When we look at adding some of that more intense work, the way I want you to think of it for most manage amateurs and the mistake they often make is they go back to like high school and think, "Okay, this means I'm going to go crank 4 by mile max effort, meaning the best I can average and feel dead at the end." I don't think that's the best way for most amateurs.
15:35 Every once in a while we need one of those workouts, which I'll get to in a little bit, but for most amateurs I think the key is stacking week after week, month after month without getting injured, without having time off that too much time off. It's just stacking good stuff. So, when it comes to these more intense sessions I actually think moderate work works better. What do I mean by moderate work? It means these even intervals or fartleks and stuff like that that we're going to get into this should finish feeling almost like kind of a threshold workout, meaning like a six or seven out of 10 versus a nine or 10 out of 10 out of on the effort scale. We're not bending over afterwards. We're sitting we're walking away saying, "Yeah, I went into some fatigue, but it was kind of fun. I felt pretty good."
16:23 The way to think of this is like the the Igloi style aerobic work. Meaning, if I tell you to go do 15 by 200, if you try and do them at mile to 800 pace with a short jog, that's going to feel hard and by maybe 15 you're going to feel pretty exhausted and that that build up in your legs, that fatigue is going to make you feel pretty bad. If I say, "Hey, I want you to do 15 200s with again a short rest, maybe a 200 jog but I want you to go from 5K down to maybe 5K to 3K and maybe the last couple at mile pace, you're going to walk away feeling like yeah, the last couple I had to work a little bit, but I feel good. Feel good fast.
17:07 It's a little tiring, but I feel good. That's how most of these speed sessions or intense sessions should be for amateurs. You're You're stacking it week after week after week. Also for amateurs, I like to go short before we go long. Meaning often what happens is we say, "Hey, we're going to do mile repeats because or the Norwegian 4 by 4 because that's what the influencer on Tik Tok or Instagram said to do." I think it's really hard to kind of deal with that kind of workout and pace it well without like pushing over to the edge.
17:42 I think you have more leeway the shorter intervals that you go. So, I'd say 200s at 5K pace or 3K pace. You know, 300s or 400s at 10K down to 5K pace. What you're doing is you're making this Yeah, you're going faster than this high-end aerobic work, but because it's a short interval and you're not going that fast, you're kind of creating a a aerobic development work that is more specific. Meaning you're running faster paces for those shorter races often, but it's aerobic because the rep length is short enough and the rest is short where it's like you're not pushing over that edge.
18:21 And yes, mile repeats are aerobic, Ks are aerobic, etc., but we often can screw them up and mess them up in terms of paces and intensities where it can go over the edge. With the shorter stuff, we can screw them up, too, but it's short enough where you can course correct along the way as well. So, that's how I kind of would see it as look at again, I'm using interval sessions, but you can do this fartlek style, minute on, minute off, 45 seconds on, 15 seconds off, you know, 90 seconds on, 30 seconds off. You play with the workouts at relatively aerobic paces, half marathon, 10K, 5K for the shorter stuff, 200s, 150s, 100s, you can go down at 3K, even mile pace.
19:03 And you play with that to kind of get some volume of feel-good fast ending at about a six or seven out of 10 instead of the the crank session. What we're doing here is we're building that kind of higher intensity slow twitch, fast twitch fibers, including all of them, building up lactate a little bit, but not crazily. Well, at the same time, mostly building our aerobic system. The exact how do we sequence this stuff?
19:35 It's going to depend again on what you're training for. For preparing for a 5K or mile, we're going to sequence a little of that faster, more specific work little bit more. But, for most people, what I would say is you kind of have a two to one ratio, meaning two aerobic and then one kind of faster session in in there. Okay? That doesn't mean every week. That means that's kind of what you cycle through. If you're training for a mile, you might want it to be a one to one ratio, meaning we do something longer aerobic and then do something like feel good fast here, especially as you get closer to that mile. If you're training for a marathon or half marathon, you might have it be three to one, meaning three kind of aerobic sessions for every kind of faster maintenance session here.
20:22 Sometimes for people in the marathon, it might even be four or five five to one. It just kind of depends. And again, I've talked a lot about intensity sessions, so you can look back on that as well. and that's too much. This would be a hour long if I kept going on this. But, you kind of get the idea. Now, the one thing that I've left out here is the long run. It's like the holy grail, the sacred cow of distance training.
20:50 Here's the deal. For a marathon, half marathon, you need the long run because it's more specific. It gets your body ready for the demands, the pounding, the fatigue, all that. Absolutely. It should be considered a key component. As we get down to the shorter distances, 10k, 5k especially mile, for amateurs the long run isn't the sacred cow. Will you get a little bit more bang for your buck from having something goes from 60 to 90 minutes or 145 hour 45? Yeah, you'll get some.
21:23 But for amateurs it's often not worth as much of the is the risk reward isn't worth as much. Because if you're training for a 5k it's not as specific, you're not going to have to get used to that pounding and it increases that injury risk and that fatigue risk and often that recoverability risk where it's hard to bounce back after a 90-minute long run for someone who's not running a lot lot of mileage because they don't have that durability.
21:52 So the shorter distances, I don't think you need a weekly long run. I think you can do go one once every two weeks or once every three weeks even to kind of top things off. And for shorter distances and you have a decent aerobic base, you might not even need one whatsoever. You might be able to get away with just hour runs or maybe occasional medium long run. But I don't think it's the be-all end-all that you need for amateurs especially on the shorter distances. So what does this look like? Okay?
22:25 Very quickly. The last part that I'd say is when we plan this into a weekly cycle it depends on the density that you're used to and you can handle. So the elite style, the old school elite style, the Frank Shorter two hard workouts plus a long run and as much mileage as you can handle means we have essentially three quality things if you count the long run as quality because of its length and everything else easy.
22:52 For an amateur only running four to five days a week or 30 miles a week maybe you can handle that but maybe you can't. Often when it comes to training for amateurs, we think of like oh, the volume is the way to quantify stress, but it's volume plus the intensity of of the work and our recoverability off of it. Some people because they're if you're used to running 100 miles a week or 80 miles a week like me and you say, "Hey, I'm going to cut to 40 miles a week."
23:22 I can handle more intensity than I could when I was doing 80 miles a week cuz my capacity has now I can fill it with something else. So, I could do two three hard sessions a week because like I can handle that now. Most people aren't in that space, okay? They're not. So, I think step one is understanding what's the density of hard workouts within the volume that you can handle. For most amateurs, I would say probably two medium hardish things a week, sometimes three.
23:54 Okay? Sometimes what I would say is this probably like two medium plus a medium long run to get three. But most I would say think of it as like two medium things a week. Some people it's just one. Maybe just one medium hard workout aerobic plus a longerish run if you're training for the marathon. Totally realistic. In fact, I have a lead runner who essentially does one hard workout and one hard long run a week, trains for the marathon, they kill it, they do great. So, think of where you fall on that density. And then the other thing in terms of your your weekly program is I like to look at it as cycling through things and not especially for amateurs, not as much as like I'm doing you know, mile repeats on Monday and temp threshold on Thursday and a long run Saturday.
24:43 You can do that as if you want, but as I mentioned earlier, I like to kind of cycle through over multi-week periods of like what am I trying to include here? And that might be a cycle of like I'm I'm to do, you know, one during one week I'm going to do two hard workouts where I do a threshold kind of sub-threshold workout and kind of a speed maintenance. And then the next week I do another threshold session and then a long run with a little bit of a pick-up aerobic intensity in there. So, you can see over this 2-week cycle we're cycling through essentially three aerobic style workouts plus one, you know, speed maintenance.
25:20 Your individual cycle is going to differ. The last thing that I'll say, okay, is once this is kind of like that this the stable period. The last phase, depending on what you're trying to do and what you're racing, is what I'd call the kind of racing phase. Which means, you know, in Lydiard speak it would be sharpening and other speak it would competition phase. Whatever you want to call it, but I'd say like, do you want to change anything over the last 4 to 6 weeks to try and get ready to knock a race out of the park.
25:57 For some amateurs, no. You don't. It's too risky. You don't want to do much specific work. You want to do something you can maintain all the time and race relatively well off of that. For others, you're going to say, "No, no. I want to see what I can do. My volume is limited, but like let's see what we can do." And that's why I like for amateurs to limit it to like 4 to 6 weeks. And this is where you're going to introduce some of that more intense work that is more of the traditional, you know, full repeats that maybe you did in high school cross country or college cross country.
26:35 Again, it's going to depend on the race. If we're training for a mile, yeah, you're going to have to do some more, maybe not full-blown Bannister like 400-m repeats, 10 by 400, but you're going to have to do more of that, okay, to get ready. What I'd call is you're going from the most workouts are moderate six to seven to I'm going to get a little bit closer to a sing god workout. Maybe for amateurs not sing god, but you know, come a little bit closer eight or nine out of 10 occasionally.
27:05 For some people this will be only, you know, when that six week period only two of those not sing god, not quite sing god where you go 10 to 10, but maybe like a hard workout where you're on the ground for a little bit after it's an eight or nine. Maybe you only do two. For some people they might be able to get away with once a week. For amateurs I would not do more than once a week generally like cranking this.
27:31 What kind of workout? Depends on what you're training for, okay? But in the last four to six weeks I'd say like connect it to something specific. So if we've been doing some 200s, 300s, 400s, you know, maybe even 600s or 800s at you know, 10k down to 5k pace or what have you, then I would might say, "Hey, if you're training for a 5k, we're going to go three by mile at at relatively work towards goal 5k pace and just crank it and see what we got."
28:00 Okay? If we're training for a mile, we might do maybe not 10 400s, but eight 400s or split up sets of 400s where we just go and crank at mile pace. If we're training for a 10k or half marathon, maybe instead of that, you know, we're going to run at three millimoles of lactate or subthreshold lactate, we're going to be three to four by you know, two mile at half marathon goal pace and with short rest in between and crank and see what happens.
28:37 The other thing that I would say here that I forgot to say here earlier that I think is important for amateurs is you can also work in what I'd call some combo work here and I think this works really well for amateurs, which is you combine some of that sub-threshold aerobic work with something like fast at the end. Meaning you do a 20-minute threshold run and and then end with 5 by 200 hills cranking pretty good. Or you do 800 repeats at half marathon to 10k effort on the track and then end with a breakdown going, you know, some 400s, 300s, 200s working down from 5k to mile pace. That's a great way to get some aerobic stimulus and then maintain some of that speed side if you don't want to transition into this faster work as well.
29:30 And that's how I kind of see it. Again, we tried tried to squeeze and summarize an amateur's version, but essentially as Marius Bakken pointed out, you're trying to get bang for your buck in terms of consistency with minimizing the risk of doing dumb things. Now I tend to think like you can control some of that faster interval work. If you're watching this video, I have faith in you. Some people can't do that and they should just do strides and stay away from the other stuff because like they can't idiot-proof it or don't have a coach who prevents them from just being high school Steve and just like cranking until you die.
30:13 That's you, know your weakness. Like build in a preventative side. Other people can't handle the threshold stuff without control based on heart rate or lactate or something like that. That's your weakness. Know it. Like figure out. This is how I do dumb things. Most of amateur and even elite training to a degree is like don't do dumb things. Meaning rapid increases in volume, rapid increases in intensity, putting too much density in a work, too quick of changes, going to the well too often to prove to yourself you're fit.
30:49 Figure out what your limiting factor and your weaknesses and like you got to build the training schedule around that to prevent it. And the last thing I'll give is this, my training, the Steve Magnus amateur training plan. This is what I did earlier in the year. I ran a stroller mile in 4:43, I think it was. Pushing one of my kiddos. Now I've got two kiddos, so now we're training for a double stroller mile, maybe.
31:20 That's way tougher pulling, too. But here was my plan is I was running probably 30 to 35 miles a week most weeks, mainly because my kid at that time like couldn't go further than an hour. Most days lasted 45 minutes without, you know, getting sick of being pushed in the stroller. Even though we had Elsa music blasting and snacks and all that good stuff. But we had them we had a limit. There were no long runs. So what did I do?
31:48 Most days a week, probably 6 days a week, ran between 45 and 60 minutes until I was robust enough where I could handle it and this is coming off of a long history of some injuries, Achilles, calf, some other stuff that was bothering me. Then what I do, I added in some strides or easy fartleks. We did them within the run because God help us if we stopped. so 15-second pick pick-ups, 20-second pick-ups, 30-second pick-ups. Eventually that translated into one day a week I was going to do something short and strides and things like that.
32:24 And then the other day a week I was going to do some high-end aerobic work, which differed, but it was essentially what I was trying to do is go I went from 20 minutes total up to 30 minutes total. And I split it up however I felt like. Often based on my toddler and deciding that you know, did she need a snack or was she having a meltdown and we needed to stop for a while? Then that would be the break and sometimes the end of the workout. And sometimes we'd, you know, do something where we'd run hard from one playground to the next and get a couple minutes of rest while she slid down the slides and went on the swings for a little bit. You just make it work.
33:07 Sometimes it was a progression run, but generally I'd have one day a week of aerobic, one day a week of some pickups. As I got used to that, I started going to build my aerobic system up a little bit more, two days a week of aerobic for maybe once every two weeks we'd have that. And then add some strides on a third day somewhere somewhere else. And there what I would do is I would do a long aerobic, meaning a progression run or some long repeats or longer fartlek or threshold run, plus short aerobic, meaning some, you know, 3-minute, 2-minute, 1-minute pickups. Again, maybe a little bit closer to threshold intensity and sometimes a little bit over, but kind of in that range. Then as I got ready to do the mile and get prepared for the mile, what did we do?
33:58 We kept one of those aerobic sessions to maintain it. And then one day a week we'd do some actually feel fast work. And again, here what I would do was kind of alternate between longer and shorter. Meaning I'd do some maybe a cutdown where I'd go Ks, 800s, 600s, etc. starting at a little bit slower than 5K pace and getting down just to kind of get me a little bit of that fitness. And on the other side we'd go short, meaning 200s, 300s starting at 5K pace working down.
34:32 The last couple weeks before I ran a mile, we do some full blown mile workouts, you know, often split up instead of the god awful ones that I did in high school and college, but things like we're going to do sets of 4-3-2 at mile pace or 400-200 at mile pace or 4 by 400 at mile pace and then a couple 300s faster and then a couple 200s faster. I think I got down to where I was I ran a couple of 200 sub 30 pushing a pushing a stroller, which is not easy.
35:07 but it was fun. In almost every one of these sessions, I would end out about a seven out of 10 for most things. Sometimes an eight out of 10. And then I did like maybe one or two sessions where I went a nine out of 10. And most of those were where I was testing to see where I was at cuz I had no idea cuz it was really hard to pace that fast with a stroller. So I'd do things like a you know, a 225 800, see how it felt pushing a stroller, then some cut down afterwards to go faster. That was the Steve Magness amateur mile training program. Was it perfect? Nope, but it kept me fit enough and fast enough to tackle my goals. And that's what it is as an amateur. You got to run your own calculus. I know this one took a little longer than normal, but hopefully this helps you understand kind of the thought processes and the tradeoffs for an amateur making these decisions. Again, it's not that mile repeats or K's or the Norwegian 4 by 4 is bad. I think they're good workouts, but what you're trying to do there is is kind of minimize the full blown intensity and volume of riskier workouts for amateurs and instead thinking, what is the most sustainable way I can do this and then building up to where you want to throw those spices of like hard full workouts to kind of you know top off if you need it and that fits in your race plan.
36:42 If you're more ambitious in your racing, well, that would make us bump us up a category from the amateur to we'll call it a serious, you know, competitive not to downplay other amateurs, but maybe we'll cover that in in the future the the masters champion we'll call it or the seriously amateur trying to maximize their fitness off, you know, controlled Thanks. So, there you go. Hopefully this helped. If it did, leave me a comment subscribe, share with your friends.
37:15 As always, let me know what you want covered and what I didn't cover here because that's how I get these ideas. My goal with this channel is to help you. So, until next time good luck in all your training and we'll keep on coming.