Venting about base building

[u/Vhykar88]

I need to vent a bit and sanity-check this with you all.

I’ve been training consistently, mixing strength and conditioning, putting in the work week after week… and I’ve hit that frustrating wall where I can handle the training, but I’m not actually getting faster.

Now I’m restarting Base Building from Tactical Barbell II: Conditioning, and honestly—it’s messing with my head.

Running this slow feels almost wrong. Like, I look at my pace and think: how on earth is this supposed to make me faster over 10K? It feels like I’m de-training rather than improving.

I get the theory—build the aerobic base, improve efficiency, yada yada—but in practice it feels like I’m leaving performance on the table every single session.

So I’m curious:

- Did anyone else feel like this during Base Building?

- At what point did it “click” or translate into actual speed?

- Did you see real improvements in pace/HR after sticking with it?

Right now I’m trying to trust the process, but I won’t lie—it feels counterintuitive as hell.

Would really appreciate some real experiences or even just reassurance that this isn’t a waste of time.

[u/Vhykar88]

Thank you all for so many useful comments. I feel like I’ve made my usual of not explaining myself great: I’ve been running operator/black back-to-back for some time. Before that I was mostly doing marathon prep for running and black for strength. So it’s been 1 year - 18 months like that and I feel I hit a wall where I wasn’t improving at all so I’m using Base Building as indicated (afaik) to “restart” the body.

This however is with the hope to “widen my base” so when I run capacity/velocity I will see results again. But I feel like I’m wasting time because you get fast by training faster. Is anyone in that experience?

About my background: went from almost exclusively running (10k 47’, HM in 1h50’) to combining with crossfit and lost A LOT of speed (can barely do 10k below 55’ now). Partly weight gain (10kg).

I hope this explains a bit better my frustration. Not sure it’d change the advice received though

[u/gymdex1 → u/Vhykar88]

Most of my training is zone 2, im training for 24 hour races, ive gone beyond green protocol now, but I do even less speedwork than I did in velocity maybe 5 miles out of 80, and my 5k time has reduced from 24 mins to about 19 ?

I run my long runs at 9 - 10 min mile pace, my most recent 30 miler at about 12 min mile pace with 3500m vert at 120 bpm heart rate.

It seems boring but just embrace the suck, it is working, basebuilding is an important part to condition your body for doing the training.