And one remark on Hayman’s tempo/low cadence work. As alluded to in other threads before, I check quite a few pros on Strava regurarily. Tempo/low cadence work is really the bread&butter for many, you see this quite often
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Agreed. The EFF team camp was A LOT of tempo/SS based on Lawson’s Strava.
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here two of my Strava extracts, the first one has already been posted here in the forum
Sepp Kuss, build up to Catalonya
massive build week followed by a very classical taper week (e.g. volume down, some intensity but with larger rest intervals and so). Interestingly, other pros preparing for this race did not do this classical taper. As it had been mentioned before, taper is something highly individual.
(K3 = low cadence work)
Joel Filliol, his ITU squad, currently on Mallorca
they don’t log the swims. This means I miss some in my table. However, what’s quite obvious: a very high workload over a week, there is intensity quite often. But each workout for itself is not really a killer workout. The focus is really on the block not on a session.
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Interesting to note that he hits the VO2 work only a week before the race, and sparsely. Kind of like the German track team which Coach Chad mentions.
He did vo2max in the weeks before. Before the taper he had 2 build weeks which were massive. Only the second build week is shown here. Dedicated vo2max work on top of these would probably have been too much stress.
Sepp is a frequent guest on the Fast Talk pod and has mentioned he’s always been self coached in the past and being a second year WT pro he’s still in a spot where the increase in volume/race days without burnout/injury is super important. Durability is huge for these guys especially at his age.
I would add “and his weight”. These days pros are so thin, really thin, it’s a thin line they are walking on. A little bit too much in training and desaster may strike.
One of my favourite papers out there. And for me this was really the one study that took away any credibility from those “polarised training claims”. I mean, if not even Norwegian XC Skiiers traini polarized, who does?
The Road to Gold: Training and Peaking Characteristics in the Year Prior to a Gold Medal Endurance Performance
Eleven elite XC skiers and biathletes
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Some of those runs might kill me. 60min at sub 5:30/mile is intense. But they are pros
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Running, Eliud Kipchoge. His training leading into the 2017 Berlin marathon.
from Seiler:
one should note that most of these were done at altitude.
Furthermore, what I find crucial:
He is as good as it gets: he’s nurtured his nature sublimely with likely 15 years of quality training. He’s found a striking balance between stressing his body and recovering. It’s not possible for anyone to succeed in training by simply adapting his highly refined structure. You may need 2-3 days between hard workouts where he might only need 1-2. It’s all relative.
Once again, it is important what you can do in a block maximizing stimulus over a week/month/year/career. Each session is not so important, the totality of all sessions is important. This is probably the key ingredient of a successful training program
Alan Couzens just twittered this, so true:
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Here’s a write-up on Alex Yee’s (triathlon wonderkid) training over a block of training earlier this year. Not that much detail, unfortunately, and most of the details concern running, but interesting as an overview.
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More important than W/kg expressed as FTP, W/kg for a specific duration is key. Most pro triathletes are holding .8 to .81 for their ironman bike legs, which is roughly 4w/kg for a little more than 4 hours, then run a sub 3 to 3 hour marathon.
Thanks to @sryke for the links above, the Michi Weiss article was a good read. Of note too is that even the pros fail their workouts sometimes, as there was a workout listed where he was doing 3x8 minutes at 105% (quoted as his 20 minute best) and he only made it through 6 minutes of the third one. But then again, he was doing them at a grindingly slow cadence.
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Again, XC Skiing (already shown in the “polarized thread”). Again, they train in the “no man’s land zone” 
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I haven’t watched that particular presentation, although I have seen it kicking about for a while. Should get round to it at some point.
Anyway, I just wanted to add some context to the numbers in the first slide:
8% of 830 hours is 1:20 minutes in the high zone per week (assuming all weeks have 16 hours of training for simplicity). That’s pretty much two high intensity sessions per week (4 x 8 minutes for example).
6% of 830 hours is just under 60 minutes in the ‘sweet spot’.
The rest is endurance work.
Considering the amount of work that can reasonably be done in these zones on a weekly basis, I don’t think that the amount of ‘sweets spot’ work is very high at all and they certainly aren’t hitting it hard for hours on end.
All of the studies that Seiler has presented show about this amount of work done in zone 2.
Mike
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Also, even when targeting high intensity, you’ll rack up some time in the medium zone. These athletes can’t forget about specificity. There was an example of a Norwegian 10k runner supporting a polarized model although she still ran a fair amount in the middle zone in one of these previous threads. What a 10k runner and marathon runner do to specialize should be different since kipchoge is racing in high tempo to just below threshold for 2 hours, and a 10k is right around 30 minutes so on the high side of threshold.
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Update on the J Filliol Squad. Unfortunately my color coding for intensity gets lost when copying it in here.
As before, I do not know if I capture all swim workouts since these do not get uploaded to Strava.
| Weekday | Date | time of day | Modality | Duration | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mo | 18.03.2019 | Travel | |||
| Di | 19.03.2019 | am | run | 00:30 | Easy Morning run |
| pm | run | 01:20 | HIIT: 10-20x40/20s o.ä. | ||
| Mi | 20.03.2019 | am | bike | 03:20 | 4x10’/5’ hill reps |
| pm | swim | ||||
| pm | run | 00:45 | Easy | ||
| Do | 21.03.2019 | am | bike | 01:30 | 30’ crit simulation |
| pm | run | 01:15 | 10x 30/30 hill reps | ||
| Fr | 22.03.2019 | am | bike | 03:30 | 1x30’ moderate climbing effort |
| Sa | 23.03.2019 | am | run | 01:30 | 60’ @ 3:20 pace (Tempollen?) |
| pm | run | 00:30 | Easy | ||
| So | 24.03.2019 | am | bike | 04:00 | 30’ climbing SST/LT |
| pm | run | 00:30 | Easy | ||
| Mo | 25.03.2019 | am | bike | 02:00 | Endurance (easy) |
| Di | 26.03.2019 | am | run | 00:30 | Easy |
| am | swim | ||||
| pm | run | 01:15 | Track workout; 14x1’/0.5’@2:48 pace | ||
| Mi | 27.03.2019 | am | swim | ||
| am/pm | bike | 03:30 | Endurance (very easy) | ||
| pm | run | 00:45 | Easy | ||
| Do | 28.03.2019 | am | bike | 02:30 | Endurance (easy with quite a few sprints) |
| pm | run | 01:15 | 10x 30/30 hill reps | ||
| Fr | 29.03.2019 | am | bike | 03:00 | Endurance |
| Sa | 30.03.2019 | am | run | 01:45 | 60’ @ 3:15 pace “Long build run” |
| pm | run | 00:30 | Easy | ||
| So | 31.03.2019 | am | bike | 04:00 | Endurance + 40’ Team-TT |
| pm | run | 00:45 | Easy | ||
| Mo | 01.04.2019 | am | bike | 02:00 | Easy |
| Di | 02.04.2019 | am | run | 00:30 | Easy |
| am | swim | ||||
| pm | run | 01:15 | Track workout; 14x1’/0.5’@2:48 pace | ||
| Mi | 03.04.2019 | am | swim | ||
| am/pm | bike | 03:30 | Endurance (very easy) | ||
| pm | run | 00:45 | Easy | ||
| Do | 04.04.2019 | am | bike | 02:30 | 5x10’; 4’RI |
| pm | run | 01:15 | 10x 40/30 hill reps | ||
| Fr | 05.04.2019 | am | bike | 03:00 | Endurance |
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In defence of Seiler here, what he pretty much always says is that the findings from elite athletes will track down to well trained amateurs. Comparing untrained and elite is like comparing Eggs with Cars.
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Agreed. I’m a Seiler fan myself, but mostly because of his very reasonable approach to improvement. Train more, get faster. And this assertion being based on the assumption that you can’t ride more if you’re hammering yourself day in day out…
Agreed. He definitely has a preference in pushing the polarized model, and with a lot of evidence based research to back it. I do think though that he’s studying a cohort that has TIME to approach their training this way. I do like how he doesn’t over complicate training.
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This thread got me to do a search which found another good one:
@Mikael_Eriksson has a few good posts in there about how to throw in the intensity to go along with the volume. I’ve been doing something very similar for my build phase, but only doing 1 hard swim, 1 hard run and 2 hard bike sessions/week. Training volume was 9-10ish hours and power and paces are as good as I’ve ever had. I did no middle intensity training. Some of my power on long rides would get in to Zone 3, but HR stayed right on the border of zone1/2 (72% of 175 max) and most of my runs were 2-3 beats above the zone2 threshold. I wish Garmin did a monthly distribution like wko4 since I’m not even going to start to try and jump in to that black hole of analysis.
Which 18 year old has won which monument with 4.6 W/Kg?
Youngest monument winner as far as I can find is a 19 year old winning the tour of Flanders in 1944.