We’ll start with THE GREAT SECRET of middle distance training. Your body is actually very very intelligent, and can adapt beautifully to new workloads and higher intensities if trained very hard, SPARINGLY, after having developed a wonderfully dense capillary bed throughout the working muscles beforehand. For every very intense training session required to sharpen an athlete to his or her current racing potential, we will be very wise to have several very easy recovery sessions. The body is not such a stupid automaton that it needs to be belted with hard session after hard session just to be able to get the message that a suitable training response is required. If it is well-prepared and healthy, it just needs an occasional well-chosen injection of more intense work with very specific intensities, paces, work volumes and recoveries to get the message and adapt in due course. Your super-intelligent body will adapt to anything you give it; even week-in, week-out hard repetitions at faster than 800m race speeds. It certainly won’t thrive on them for very long- it’ll just cope with them, or make you injured so as to repair itself, or make you sick so you have to rest. Not ideal at all. It knows what it needs, even if your conscious brain doesn’t!

As an analogy, if someone comes along and speaks quietly in your ear with a certain message, are you going to be able to remember it better or worse than if the same message is delivered several times with a megaphone right in your earhole? Beyond a point that is individual to each of us depending on our training background, health, and genetics, there are diminishing returns. I’d rather train an already very aerobically-fit athlete with a hint of intense work at race-specific speeds with plenty of recovery, than do a ’stellar’ session, anytime. A ’stellar’ session may occur when good circumstances align and the athlete has one of those ‘excellent’ high-energy days. The trouble is that a ’stellar’ session that is above the realistic pace to be held in training is likely to deplete deep energy reserves at the cost of progress.

The athlete and coach should have the good sense and confidence to just trust that an already-fit body will adapt extremely well to a boringly ’solid’ session. Physically and psychologically, there is ‘nowhere to go’ from a too-intense session. Time spent training in that danger zone is basically a complete waste of time and fraught with health and injury risks. The trouble here is that we all have the capacity to train harder than our current level of development would indicate is prudent. Progress is made in a boring ‘brick-in-the-wall’ progression where we really are not after any stellar sessions.

Next post:getting ready for the big races! How we get ready.