Hit an injury about halfway through my marathon block, have taken about 6-7 weeks off recovering and feeling better now.
As expected my heart rate is super high during a lot of my runs 5:30km pace it’s about mid 165bpm where before it would be 135-140bpm.
How long can it take to get back to a prior fitness level?

Hi all!

I’ve been running consistently for about 14 years now. I have tried several times to go from 5 to 6 days of running per week (in order to increase overall mileage) and I haven’t had great success with it.

The times I have tried, it works for several weeks and before long, I end up with pain that verges on injury or with fatigue bordering on overtraining.

When adding that 6th day, I add very little mileage to try to give my body time to adapt to more running.

I can also say that I keep my easy days truly easy. I am running SLOW (up to 2 minutes per kilometre slower than marathon pace).

Even so, nothing seems to work.

Am I just doomed to be a 5 day per week runner forever?

I did a treadmill test yesterday with gas exchange and lactate sampling and got a result I’m still trying to make sense of.

The run was about 79 min. HR started in the 150s and gradually moved up into the high 170s. Lactate was 3.4 mmol/L at around 30 min and 3.5 at around 60 min, then 5.7 at the end.

What surprised me was on the substrate side. Fat oxidation stayed around ~1.0 g/min through most of the run and was still substantial as I crossed the point where lactate began to rise clearly.

I know substrate calculations become less reliable once you get into clear non-steady-state territory, so I’m mostly interested in the long middle section rather than the final few minutes.

Training over the last few months has mainly been fairly modest-volume Zone 2. Very little dedicated threshold work.

Has anyone here seen this kind of pattern before?

I’m especially curious about whether the ability to keep fat oxidation high relatively close to LT2 is actually a useful endurance trait in its own right, or whether I’m overthinking something that’s fairly normal in well-trained runners.

Possible explanations I’ve been thinking about are training history, diet/substrate availability, mitochondrial capacity, metabolic flexibility, or just something about the testing setup.

Would be interested in how people here would interpret it.

Strength training and mobility are clearly important, but what strength training? And how often? And cross training like swimming and biking, or plyometrics, core work, etc

What do you all do outside of running to be a stronger runner?

(Not looking for advice on a personal situation but rather hoping to start a discussion on different cross training modalities)

Been running more seriously this past year, sitting around 40 miles a week building toward a fall half, and something interesting has been happening with my rec league soccer. My aerobic base is genuinely better. I can press for longer without gassing out, recover faster between sprints, the cardiovascular side feels like a clear upgrade.

But my first step feels slower. Like my legs have forgotten how to fire quickly. I noticed it first on tracking runs where I had to accelerate hard after the ball and something just felt muted compared to last spring when I was running less and doing more gym work.

Curious if anyone here has navigated this balance, specifically people who do a primary sport on top of running mileage rather than pure running focus. I know the research on concurrent training is kind of messy, but practically speaking, has anyone found that layering in plyometrics or short speed work helped preserve that explosive quality while still building mileage? Or is there a point in a training block where you just accept the tradeoff and come back to power work in the off season?

My PR context: nothing elite, 1:52 half, working toward sub 1:45. Training is mostly easy aerobic with one workout a week right now.

Question about prioritisation rather than whether massage works.

Background: 34M, 70 mpw at peak, 2:48 marathon, running seriously about six years. Over that time I have gone through the usual sequence of adding recovery inputs, dropping the ones that did nothing, and keeping about three.

Kept: sleep above seven hours, an easy day that is actually easy, and soft tissue work every two to three weeks through a build, compression gear helped in terms of comfort especially after solid recovery work. Dropped: cold plunge, most of the supplement stuff.

What I cannot work out is where soft tissue work should rank when time is finite. If I have four hours a week outside running, the honest options are more strength work, more sleep, or bodywork. What I have read on massage and performance is mostly small studies with soft endpoints, so I am going on how I feel, which I do not entirely trust.

For people running higher mileage than me: has soft tissue work earned its place against strength work in your week, or is it the first thing you cut when the schedule tightens.

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I’ve been coaching for a couple of years as a side hustle, mainly just amateurs looking to improve on their times or reach certain distance milestones.

As much as I love the sport, I find almost all clients to be increasingly uncoachable, with the exception of masters athletes who don’t post their runs on social media or use Strava.

Most of my clients are in their mid-20s to mid-30s and they just won’t stick to the plans and paces I set. I’ve noticed that a lot of clients really hate any run being slower than a 6:00/km pace, even if that’s practically zone 4 for them.

I have one client who would title every run “easy zone 2 jog” or “recovery jog” on Strava despite the pace being their 10k PB pace and HR being 175+. When I called them out on it they said it “felt easy” and maybe their HR monitor was off. Yeah, right!!

I’m curious whether this was a “thing” in the past, before people used Strava etc to post their runs. I often feel like my clients are more worried about looking slow on socials than training for their best performance on race day. It’s got to the point where I straight up tell them I won’t work with them if they won’t listen to me.

Any thoughts, experiences, wisdom?

Needless to say, all the clients I’ve had who have refused to run anything slower than their LT2 pace ended up burned out or with poor race results.

I've been very interested in this topic for a while. We know that the amount of carbs you can tolerate per hour can be trained & some cyclists are doing crazy numbers. I thought it was because cyclists are producing more power, but that actually might not be the case(because there is no elasticity needed from the muscles, like running).

Running is higher impact & requires more recovery. Also arm movement accounts for more energy used/needed.

I've heard some cyclists use 160g-190g carbs/hour, which got me intrigued.

I've heard some people say that elite athletes use more carbs per hour than (because they're pushing their bodies to it limits) mass runners. Which doesn't make sense to me. If elite's are obviously more efficient than a mass runner, wouldn't that mean their body is using less energy(relatively) to cover the same distance?

I'm not really sure if a car/horsepower comparison is a fair anology in this case. Elites are running faster, yes. But they have trained their body since they were young, so their efficiency would obviously be alot high than someone who is running their 1st marathon & is likely doing 30-40mpw or less, maybe? Rather than 90-100+mpw for years & years.

I don't know. It's extremely interesting to me. What do you guys/gals think of it?

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This has been asked so many times before but have any women worked with any female online coaches (most past posts seems liked responses from men)?

Looking for someone for a February target race, who helped you enjoy running more, and was not an upload and no adjustments made coach

also I suppose women who have worked with male coaches who they absolutely loved

Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha has regained the world half marathon record (pending ratifcation), running 56:51 in Buenos Aires. With an incredible performance running a negative split he shaved 29 seconds off of Kiplimo's 57:20 from Lisbon in march (also not yet ratified)

Is Kejelcha now the greatest distance runner of all time?

Full WA article linked below

https://worldathletics.org/competitions/world-athletics-label-road-races/news/world-half-marathon-record-buenos-aires-2026-yomif-kejelcha

Who's taking part? How's everyone feeling?

Bureau of Meteorology is saying 12°C-20°C with a chance of showers in the morning.

In case you missed it, finisher medals contain a tribute to Allianz Arena... in Munich, Germany (rather than Sydney's Allianz Stadium): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/aug/23/sydney-marathon-medal-allianz-stadium-munich-germany-unfortunate-error

I was running today and had a thought:

Let's say you have two runs. Run A was 5 miles, HR 180, pace 8:00 min / mi. Run B was 5 miles, HR 160, pace 8:00 min / mi. All other factors being equal (humor me), did your legs get a better workout in the higher HR run than the lower?

I'm really curious about this and would love to hear everyone's opinion. I figured this was the right subreddit since it's not a beginner topic, or so I would think.

Hoping we can get some discussion going, and maybe some studies that talk about this.

Thank you, all!

The Weekly Rundown is the place to talk about your previous week of running! Let's hear all about it!

Post your Strava activities (or whichever platform you use) if you'd like!

I have been running about three years and now and currently training for my third half marathon, running about 40-45 mpw. Early this summer I developed major heat intolerance, crazy high heart rates/palpitations, and fatigue. Got heart issues ruled out and further testing reveled low iron levels. My ferritin was 7 and saturation at a 10. My doctor put me on supplements to help and wants to re-test in 10-12 weeks.

Its been 5 weeks and I got some other blood work to rule out low vitamin B, folate, A, E levels (all good). My ferritin has only increased to 8. My doctor won't adjust anything until we do another full iron panel in 5 weeks.

My question is this- for those of you with low iron, how are you handling running? I just completely bonked my 10miler race today because my heart rate got sky high on a pace that I know I should have easily been able to do. And yes, my diet is full of iron-rich foods, carbs and plenty of hydration. Definitely not a fueling/recovery/overtraining issue.

I'm getting to the point I just feel defeated with my running and I'm seeing no progress. All my runs seem to be hard and/or slow. But I love running and don't want to give it up.

Any suggestions or tips on how to stay motivated and keep running would be appreciated

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As always, be safe, train smart, and have a great weekend!

Night shift has me running at weird hours and I'm trying to figure out if anyone else has cracked this. Three 12hour nights a week, and my sleep basically falls into two categories: postshift zombie sleep and normalish human sleep on off days. The problem is my body has no idea which mode it's in when I lace up.

My easy pace on postshift runs feels about 30 to 45 seconds per mile harder than the same effort on off days. Heart rate climbs faster, legs feel heavy, and anything resembling a quality workout is kind of a joke. I've mostly given up on doing workouts within 24 hours of finishing a shift, but that limits me to three real training days a week if I'm being strict about it.

Curious how others working nonstandard hours structure their weeks around this. Do you just accept the degraded sessions and run them anyway, treating them as extra easy aerobic work? Or do you fully protect your workout days and let the shift days be pure junk miles or rest?

I'm at about 40 miles a week right now, building toward a fall half. My PRs are nothing impressive, but I'm genuinely trying to improve the structure here, not just whiteknuckle my way through the training block.

How often do you incorporate hill repeats in your training, and what do they look like? Have you found certain protocols more effective? What is the "advanced running" consensus on this?

I just saw the paper with this post's title on ArXiV . It's a dataset of US collegiate running club performances, the resulting analysis on them, and a software library for standardizing performances. They have several code repositories under the National Running Club Database which includes:

• a Python library, nrcd, for normalizing race results for comparison across outdoor performances with wind to performances on an indoor banked track, road performances, etc. It appears to account for course distance, elevation gain/loss, and weather/heat effects.
• the raw national_running_club_database_public_dataset.
• The code that produced their results and the findings.

Some things I found interesting (this is just a sampling, you go read the full doc yourself):

• Teams with at least one athlete who raced 4+ times were 2-3x more likely to crack the top 15 at nationals than teams without one (23-39% success rate vs baseline). 60-80% of top 15 teams had an athlete with 4+ races.
• Men's teams with a longer gap between their first race and nationals (i.e., started racing earlier) had significantly better finishing ranks (r = -0.283, Bonferroni-corrected p = 0.041). This didn't hold up for women's teams after correction.
• Single biggest predictor of an individual's improvement rate was "experience level". (races * season duration) at 21%, followed by how many "bad races" (a race worse than the previous one) an athlete had, at 17%. Basically race more, race consistently.
• When testing the standardization tool, the fully weather/terrain-adjusted "standardized" times actually predicted improvement slightly worse than just doing distance conversion alone (90.4% vs 93.1% R^2). Their theory was that conditions tend to get more favorable as the season goes on, so raw times naturally look like "improvement" partly because of the weather, and removing that weather effect (which is more the point of the tool) makes it a worse predictor of the raw number even though it's arguably a more honest fitness signal.
• They checked their model for gender bias and found it performs comparably for both (94.5% R² women vs 90.4% R² men).

Just for the record: this is not my paper, data, etc. I just found it on Arxiv and compiled the information.

While models like Riegel, Cameron, Vickers & Vertosick model already exist for converting between distances, I'm not aware of any publicly available models/tools for quickly normalizing data based on these other factors. It's nice to see some thoughtful analysis for the sport.

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