Strava co-founder Michael Horvath once explained that he had wanted to recreate the camaraderie he’d felt on his rowing team in college. One reviewer recalls that it resembled “a small mobile phone strapped to your wrist.” Runner’s World ran a review beneath the line “Too much information? Impossible,” explaining that it uses the same GPS technology that “is becoming more common in motorized navigation.” In 2009, shortly before Seiler published the wide-ranging review paper, a service called Strava launched that allowed athletes to upload their Garmin workouts to a social network where all could see how far and how fast they’d traveled. In 2003, as Seiler was observing the habits of Norwegian athletes, Garmin came out with the first wearable “watch” for athletes, the Forerunner 101, a rectangular device displaying distance, time, and the calculation that results from dividing one into the other: pace. (The problem is: Who sticks to their training schedule?) Seiler and his co-authors chalked this up to the fact that some runners did not adhere perfectly to the prescribed running schedules, arguing that if you look at the runners who truly did polarized training, they clearly performed better. However, this result was not statistically significant (the study was pretty small). After 10 weeks, the participants ran a 10k.īoth groups saw improvements in their 10k paces, and the average time for runners in the polarized plan improved by an additional half minute. For a 2014 paper (which I first saw referenced in the caption of a Reel, where else?) he, along with researchers at the European University of Madrid, randomly assigned 30 recreational runners to one of two training plans: one that included a bunch of time at a mid-level intensity, and one that was polarized. Seiler followed up his work on elite endurance athletes with a look at how more ordinary people may benefit from the 80/20 split. In technical terms, what he found was that “the predominance of low-intensity, long-duration training, in combination with fewer, highly intensive bouts may be complementary in terms of optimizing adaptive signaling and technical mastery at an acceptable level of stress,” explaining that what he observed specifically by poring over studies of elite athletes was that 80/20 split. In a 2010 review paper, Seiler looked at descriptive studies of the training habits of competitive endurance athletes ranging from runners to rowers to cross-country skiers. The concept comes from Stephen Seiler, an exercise scientist at the University of Agder in Norway. This is, after all, what many of the greats do. In any case, a mix of both fast and slow workouts increasingly seems to be the best way to make you the best runner you can be, particularly since many of us lace up, as Williams used to, with the misguided idea that running will typically involve some “huffing and puffing.”Īs for what that mix should be, many running influencers who started popping up on my feed specifically reference a paradigm called “polarized training,” in which 80 percent of one’s workouts are done at a slow pace (one at which you can hold a conversation comfortably), and 20 percent at a rather hard pace. (This kind of work requires biopsying the muscle, which makes it tricky to do in humans-hence the fish). The study of how mitochondria are affected by various kinds of training is ongoing, as the authors of a 2021 paper on how trout responded to HIIT exercises explain. Proponents of slow running argue further that it has a suite of specific physiological benefits, like increasing the number of mitochondria, or cellular “powerhouses,” in your body. This makes intuitive sense-rest more, have the will and enthusiasm to work very hard a small portion of the time. This is the idea behind covering lots of miles at a slow pace: It allows you to truly push the pace on “hard” days, as well as build up more weekly mileage than you could if you were trying to run fast every time you lace up, which is crucial for distances like the marathon or even the 10k. This makes a lot of intuitive sense-rest more, have the will and enthusiasm to work very hard a small portion of the time.
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