I know, we're not runners. (Well, I kind of am now, but that's neither here nor there.) This is one of the best books on endurance training I've ever read. A lot of the nuts and bolts about what workouts target what systems lines up very closely with the current thinking of the wattage-list crowd, although his season-wide vision is more conventionally "periodised" than the "go-hard-or-go-home" approach popular here. Still, the book reads a lot like the usual literature about power meters. He is very cautious about the bogosity of heart rate, he preferring target paces set from a known reference pace. Ahh, to compete in a sport where a stopwatch works pretty well as a power meter... He also has a TSS-esque weighted intensity that produces a sort of "normalized easy miles per week" metric for training volume.
One of the nicer explanations in the book is his breakdown on the difference between what we'd consider L7 and L6 (he kinda treats L6 and L5 similarly, to my way of thinking). He describes the former as "fast", and the latter as "hard." This gets to an interesting property of L7 workouts that I've always struggled to communicate: while they're more "intense" than L5/L6 in the sense of involving higher power outputs (or higher speeds if running), they don't require anywhere near as much mental energy to execute successfully. Even though they're "fast," they're not "hard." So, somewhat like Carmichael, his athletes' "base" involves piles of highL2/lowL3 mixed in with almost daily L7. This may make more sense in running, where substantial technical and structural improvements to economy are possible via L7, but I still think the idea of "getting used to going fast" might be valuable to cyclists as well, if only psychologically.
Any other good training literature from other sports? All you SST types would get a kick out of Lydiard...
One of the nicer explanations in the book is his breakdown on the difference between what we'd consider L7 and L6 (he kinda treats L6 and L5 similarly, to my way of thinking). He describes the former as "fast", and the latter as "hard." This gets to an interesting property of L7 workouts that I've always struggled to communicate: while they're more "intense" than L5/L6 in the sense of involving higher power outputs (or higher speeds if running), they don't require anywhere near as much mental energy to execute successfully. Even though they're "fast," they're not "hard." So, somewhat like Carmichael, his athletes' "base" involves piles of highL2/lowL3 mixed in with almost daily L7. This may make more sense in running, where substantial technical and structural improvements to economy are possible via L7, but I still think the idea of "getting used to going fast" might be valuable to cyclists as well, if only psychologically.
Any other good training literature from other sports? All you SST types would get a kick out of Lydiard...
