The Rundown

Not Too Slow, Not Too Fast. In the world of endurance sports, it’s getting hard to beat the Norwegians. Take for example Norwegian track star Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who just finished a very successful long-distance running season, earning world records in 2,000 metres and two miles.

Ingebrigtsen’s countryman Kristian Blummenfelt won the Olympic triathlon title and Gustav Iden took an Ironman world championship. Ingebrigtsen’s older brother Filip is a world championship 1,500-metre medalist, and his other older brother Henrik was fifth at the 2012 Olympics.

The secret to all this success? A training method dubbed the “Norwegian Model,” where the intensity level is kept at medium. The evidence of its effectiveness was enough for a group of endurance researchers to publish an article earlier this year asking if the model was “the next step in the evolution of distance running training.”

The approach, which was pioneered twenty years ago by a Norwegian runner named Marius Bakken, focuses on threshold training. This type of training is about sustained efforts that seek a boundary somewhere between easy and hard.

To see if they’re in the right zone, elite athletes like Ingebrigtsen measure the lactate levels in their blood by taking small pinpricks from their fingers or earlobes in the middle of workouts.

Since most of us probably don’t have a portable lactate meter handy, the best way to approximate this is to keep your subjective sense of effort at a six or seven on a scale of one to ten. You could also try talking to a training partner. If you can communicate in short phrases—not complete sentences and not one or two words—you’re on the right track.

You should breakup the workout into parts lasting one to six minutes each with the aim of reaching a half-hour total. Take a one-minute break between intervals so your intensity doesn’t go beyond the threshold zone.

The goal is to maximize the trade-off between how hard you exercise and your recovery time before the next workout. According to one study, pushing just ten percent harder than the threshold zone fatigues you four to five times quicker than exercise within the threshold zone.

Ingebrigtsen reportedly does two threshold training sessions in a single day, twice a week, along with many miles of easy running during the week and Saturday hill sprints. So it’s not all threshold training all the time.

How you incorporate threshold training into your routine depends on your goals but adding a few sessions in between hard and easy workouts could be a good way to shake things up.

Super Shoe Durability. How long do super foam running shoes last before you need to toss them? A recent paper published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports investigated.

Before super shoes, it was generally thought that running shoes lost their cushioning somewhere between 300 to 500 miles. When super shoes arrived on the scene in 2017, namely Nike’s Vaporfly, its carbon fiber plate and thick layer of cushioning promised improved running economy but with less durability. The unscientific consensus was that they lasted for about 100 miles or so.

For the study, the researchers used special prototypes by On. One set had a traditional running shoe EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate) foam midsole and the other had the newer super shoe PEBA (polyether block amide) foam midsole.* Both versions had a curved carbon-fiber plate.

Twenty-two volunteers did a running economy test to measure how much energy they burned at a specific pace, once in fresh shoes and once in shoes that were pre-worn. (The researchers ran exactly 280 miles in each pair of shoes to pre-wear them).

There were two key findings:

1. In the new PEBA shoe, energy consumption was 1.8 percent lower than in the new EVA shoe. So, there is a clear advantage in terms of running economy in a super shoe.

2. After 280 miles, the EVA shoe didn’t lose anything, while the PEBA shoe got 2.2 percent worse. So, at 280 miles, the super shoe was no better than the regular running shoe.

What the study doesn’t say is what happens after 280 miles or even 26 miles. There is also evidence that super foams maintain their properties in cold winter conditions while EVA-based foams become more rigid. And finally, shoe foams typically take over 24 hours to recover from a run but some snap back faster than others.

The takeaway? As some runners suggest, you may want to consider shoe durability based on personal feeling. Once the cushioning starts to feel flat, try running in them but pay more attention to how you feel before and after a session. If you begin to experience aches and pains, it’s probably time to ditch the shoes. You may not be maximizing your performance, as the data suggests, but it could help you stay healthy.

*Carlos Sanchez at RunRepeat has a primer on the vast range of high-performance foams on the market.

Extra Point

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Blindsided. Former NFL lineman Michael Oher’s story, as told in the book and subsequent film, The Blind Side, claims Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy brought Oher into their family as a young man and helped him pave a path to the NFL. Recently, Oher alleged that he was led to believe he was adopted, but in reality, the Tuohys had filed a conservatorship and made millions from a false narrative.

The documentary Blindsided “exposes the truth behind the Hollywood spin on Oher’s story” and features first-person accounts from Oher’s foster brothers, former caregivers, high school classmates and teammates from Ole Miss and the NFL as well as Quinton Aaron, the actor who played Oher in the original film. Blindsided is streaming on Max.

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