Forums >General Running>What's up with this FIRST training?
I'm far from a great runner, but I hear what you're saying Stephen.
Some other things I don't like about FIRST. I have figured out, partly through trial and error, that I can't handle three hard workouts per week--so I don't do them. I do two at most. I've figured out that easy mileage is not the hard part of any training program and almost no amount of it seems to do me in...it's the workouts. I've also learned that the more easy mileage I'm running, the bigger and harder workouts I can handle. So why would I want to increase the amount of high intensity training, which I know raises my injury and burn out risk, while simultaneously reducing my easy mileage, which I know helps me recover for the hard workouts? That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.
I'll be giving this a try for my next marathon. If anyone's interested, I've come across a FIRST workout generator in an Excel document. Download it here. Put your race date and goal time in the white cells and your 16 week program will be automatically generated. Now go give'er!
Feeling the growl again
"If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does. There's your pep talk for today. Go Run." -- Slo_Hand
I am spaniel - Crusher of Treadmills
veggies on the runMartial Artist Runners
Stephen, you bring up another point about FIRST that worries me a bit. One thing I did before I learned better (there was no internet when I started running, I learned a lot by screwing up and then hearing 10 years later that the pros had arrived at the same conclusion years before...oh well) was that I thought I'd get better faster by hammering every workout I did. If it was not an easy run, I put my guts into it. I dry heaved after workouts and felt like the big man. My college coach told me that what I lacked in speed I made up for in guts. The problem is, I never got much faster doing that. I got burned out, I got hurt. But not a whole lot faster. I think it is a common mistake for people to make -- running workouts too hard. Unless they are sprint intervals, most aerobic intervals (ie 3k-race-paced or slower) are not meant to be all-out efforts. You shouldn't feel absolutely trashed after these workouts. Tired, yes. Trashed, no. With a program like FIRST that emphasizes a large bulk of hard work, I'm concerned that people feel pressured to run it too hard.
One of the best changes I ever made in my training was to ease up my intervals. I used to run 800s by doing 2 sets of 4 for 8 total, with 2-2:30 minutes recover between intervals and 5 minutes recovery between sets. Man would I haul on those intervals! After a lot of reading and talking to REALLY good runners, I went to 8X800 straight with only 90sec recovery. I had to slow them down, but the result was I spent more time working my high-end aerobic system and not going so anaerobic. I got a lot better results and within a few months I could run them as fast as I had before but now with less recovery. Like I said, I'm sure the program will work for many people for a period of months before plateauing. If you think about the plan, if you are already working very hard to try and hit those workouts there isn't much of a place to go with it once you plateau. This is why I compare it to a classic peaking period, it's much the same thing. Of course there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of that period of improvement! Good luck with your training, and keep us updated on how it works out for you.
PS - A few thoughts on mileage. People typically log miles as in running it's often thought that mileage is synonymous with work. While this link is not 100% it follows more or less. But 50 mpw with 15 miles of good quality is not the same as 50 easy miles. It's about quantity AND quality. I'm not suggesting quantity over quantity over quality when I disagree with FIRST....I'm just talking what I feel is a more appropriate balance of quality and quantity. Look up "5-pace training". Different paces lead to different adaptations...you can't exclude slow runs and expect fast runs to do the same thing.
... In my mind, anybody who can run a sub 3 marathon is a great runner.
Perhaps you have heard of the concept the training impulse or TRIMP, where work-outs are graded by intensity, as measured by heart rate, and duration. A simple TRIMP measure is just work-out duration x average heart rate, but there are more complex ways to calculate it based on the times spents at different RPEs or heart rate training zones.
When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done?
Stephen - have you looked at Cooper Aerobic Points? I don't know much about them, but I read about them when I first started running. I seem to remember them working similarly to what TRIMP does - but maybe not with the HR.
Also, it's not really new, it's been around for a good number of years. I think it's growing in popularity because of Runner's World. But RW and RT have had articles on it in the past.