I recently came across some words of wisdom from running great Ingrid Kristiansen. Kristiansen is a highly decorated runner and former world record holder in the marathon. While her methods may not be productive to all runners, she enjoyed a stellar career while "sticking to her plan".

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Some words about running

Running is the most natural way of moving the human body besides walking. Running is something many people (without disabilities) have tried out and tested. It is  independent of where you live, of your climate and of your economical situation and available facilities. 

Because of this, the level of the running performances is probably higher  than in all other types of sports. You need little or no equipment (there are still many barefoot runners around in the world). Running performances can be measured both relatively and absolutely.

You will  immediately find out how you are doing in a race relative to your competitors, and in some types of races you are also able to compare your performance relative to absolute references like personal best, as well as club, state, national  and world records. 

Running is a brutal sport because it is so easy to measure the performance. When a race starts, all competitors start at the same time. This will immediately tell you if you are fast or slow relative to the others in the race. (in cross-country skiing, on the other hand, the skiers normally start every 30 seconds)

Our running competence comes from endurance, say from 1,500m and up. We feel, however that the word endurance is not fully understood by many runners. How many times have you heard runners complain that they have too little speed? Very few, if any, long distance runners need much speed; what they need is more endurance. 

Ingrid was probably the "slowest runner in the world" when we talk about speed or sprint talent. She had no chance running a 400m lap under 60 seconds. Some previous coaches had actually laughed at Ingrid's results in her sprint and elasticity tests. Speed and elasticity have little or very limited importance in long distance running. The important element is endurance, endurance and more endurance.

The main activity for a long distance runner is to run, run and run again. All focus on speed, elasticity and strength is very often over rated. While this type of training can be done in a few minutes daily, we talk about 1-2 hours daily of the main activity: running. It is not the speed that fails when a runner is not able to make the last 100m sprint finish in a 1,500m. track and field race. It is his/her endurance that fails.

Even newer literature and references about the distribution of the aerobic and the anaerobic work requirement in running use wrong and misleading values. The reason is that the old test method,  the Oxygen Debt method, has very large inaccuracies. Newer research have provided a more accurate method, the  Accumulated Oxygen Deficit (AOD). The consequence of this is that the aerobic work content has been underrated up until now.

Energy distribution in %.

Distance	AOD. new method	Old. wrong method	Difference %
400m	46 +/-4% aerobic	25% aerobic	21-25%
800m	69 +/-4% aerobic	50% aerobic	19-23%
1,500m	83 +/-3% aerobic	65% aerobic	18-21%

Sources: AOD data: "Energy system contribution during 400m to 1,500m running, by Matt R. Spencer, Paul B. Gastin and Warren R. Payne. New studies in Athletics, no. 4/1996.

Oxygen debt data: "Keep on running. The Science of Training and Performance". Eric Newsholme, Tony Leech, Glenda Duester, -1994 -John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The new data is quite sensational, as it emphasizes the importance of aerobic power not only for long distances, but also for middle distances like 800m and 1,500m. As you can see, the differences between the new and old percentages are large compared to the previous inaccurate data: they are approximately 20%. If you use traditional % calculations on, for example, the 800m, the difference between 69 and 50 is:

(100%/69)*50 = approx 72%, or (100%/50) * 69= approx. 138%. Depending of what number you use as reference, the methods are from 28 to 38% in difference. (i.e. about 30 to 40%)

So the message is very clear to all middle distance runners: Forget about the high risk and painful anaorobic training. As you can see,  it has less importance than earlier believed. Go out in the woods and run more, mostly long runs, plus some intervals and fartleks. 

From the same source of the AOD data it was also concluded that the anaerobic capacity for a runner is equal to one quantity of energy, and this quantity is the same whether you run 400m, 800m, 1,500m or 10,000m. In the tests it was shown that the anaerobic capacity was the same in all distances, 400m, 800m and 1,500m. (calculated to a oxygen "cost" of 48ml/kg) 

Longer distances than 1,500m will be more and more dominated by aerobic energy. The only anaerobic training a long distance runner needs will normally be what you get in the competitions. Our strong advise is to forget all tempo training; it very often causes more damage than gain.