u/toflobo

I thought the community might find some value in looking at the training the hobbyjogger Ingebrigsten did leading up to his 2:29* debut at Copenhagen (*congrats to him on the family PR!).

I decided to start the block from when he included a 18k tempo workout that he described on Strava as "we need to start somewhere." He ran a couple weeks prior to this of fairly vanilla workouts that included a 28-30k long run. Reminder that he also trained for Valencia in Autumn-Winter last year so a lot of that fitness, and learnings from the block, carried over I'm sure.

Note that paces are ballpark estimates, and are relative to his eventual Marathon race pace so an imperfect measure but interesting nonetheless hopefully. All other volume was easy running in the 4:30-4:50/km range.

Overall it seems like a slightly different approach than what Sirpoc has taken, and I'm sure people will point to the fact that KI ran 5mins slower, but I'd argue it still delivered a great result and shares many of the same core principles. Just executed in a slightly different way.

A few things that stood out to me were:

• Apart from a couple weeks (182km + 142km) his weekly volume didn't seem to be a massive increase to what he's done historically, the bigger change perhaps being how that volume was structured. The alternation between higher and lower volume weeks was notable and maybe the biggest difference I notice.
• Alternating bigger interval workouts and steady tempos as the X session on Saturdays (n.b. he mentioned the 30-20-10-2x6 session in wk9 as being a bit of an experiment by Henrik)
• It's clear that recovery and managing fatigue remained at the centre; several weeks of just 2 sessions and the intensity across the board was very conservative (probably my biggest personal takeaway). The jump into bigger sessions starting in week 8 was paired with increased recovery (training camp, removing 1x weekly session, or reduced Long run).

Keen to hear other's thoughts and hope it leads to a fruitful discussion.