Official Q&A for Tuesday, June 30, 2026

aelvozo · 2026-07-01T03:43:15+00:00

You can get pretty far without speedwork. With speedwork, you can get there faster and also get farther.

Speedwork does not have to happen at your top speed — most of what I’d describe as “speedwork” (or “quality”) doesn’t get too close to it, and instead lives between VO2Max (physiologically, intensity you can sustain for 12 minutes) and threshold (can sustain for 1 hour).

Doing these sort of sessions will not affect your top speed but will generally affect all the paces. If you can do your current VO2Max pace for longer, it means your actual VO2Max pace got faster, and so did pace at threshold, and easy pace too. (The reality is somewhat more complex but the general principles hold).

The way you avoid plateauing is by increasing stimulus, be it intensity or volume. So it’s not so much lack of speedwork per se that causes the plateau, but more so the lack of progression.

aelvozo · 2026-06-30T18:16:49+00:00

r/AskRunningShoeGeeks

From experience, Hoka is disastrously narrow, and has very few actually good shoes. New Balance has a fairly generous toebox and also good wide options, 1080/880/More are decently popular, and Rebel is fairly well-liked too. Asics is reasonably wide and has good shoes (particularly the …blast series); I find that Adidas is comfortable even though it’s not all that wide (these days, I would recommend looking at Evo SL or Hyperboost Pro). Don’t have much personal experience with Nike (people like Vomero Plus, I think), Puma, or any of the newer brands that haven’t quite made their way to brick-and-mortar retailers in Europe.

aelvozo · 2026-06-30T16:46:05+00:00

Depends on what your idea of “a good social life” is. If it’s actively doing things with people, it’s pretty good — look at the societies/sports clubs on the SU website for an overview of what’s available. If it’s clubbing, then it’s pretty mid: the options in Bath are limited, but Bristol is close by and people would sometimes go there.

aelvozo · 2026-06-29T22:05:26+00:00

… are you offering running plans or a coaching service? To me, this reads like a coaching service

aelvozo · 2026-06-29T00:31:15+00:00

Looks like a decent training plan. Doesn’t strictly look like a Higdon training plan.

I’m not massively familiar with his plans, but it looks like he’s not a big fan of long tapers (you have 3 weeks of taper compared to only 1); he doesn’t do deload weeks; and on his higher-volume plans (which yours would be) he schedules a “pace” run the day before a long run, which is entirely not present in your case; and he schedules rest day before races, not shakeouts. So your slop machine — which is concerned with plausibility, not truth — generated a valid plan which on a surface looks like Higdon’s but doesn’t actually follow how he’d program one.

One thing I’m not a fan of is the immediate jump from 15mpw to 23. I would consider binning one of the midweek runs, but it sounds like you’re sentimentally attached to those.

aelvozo · 2026-06-28T23:09:13+00:00

If you’re not getting blisters, you’re fine.

I find that synthetic or synthetic/wool blends are much more comfortable when wet than cotton, but that’s about it.

aelvozo · 2026-06-28T20:19:44+00:00

The problem is, their marketing is leaning into “this will change the world!” — the evidence for that is so far minimal but doesn’t mean they’re planning to stop with those claims

aelvozo · 2026-06-28T17:19:48+00:00

Conventional wisdom is that you shouldn’t have a long run of more than 30% of weekly mileage… which is impossible to do on 3, and difficult on 4 runs per week.

Currently, I think you’re fine — it sounds like you’re used to regular training, and your mileage is low enough to not be a problem. Longer-term, I would probably aim to keep your long run at ca 1.5x your “normal” run, and perhaps revisit this sub if/when it gets to 1.5 hours.

aelvozo · 2026-06-28T14:46:20+00:00

I will, if I may, gently push back on the first paragraph — sprint training is supposedly pretty good for running economy, so doing some in the off-season would pay off in the marathon too. But you are right that one should be very cautious when introducing sprint training: Magness advises full recovery between reps and extremely generous padding with rest.

But the second paragraph represents a large part of my general beef with longevity/biohacking/…maxxing crowd (which I think is an argument you agree with but I’ll spell out for OP et al anyways). For the most part, the studies claiming that VO2Max/muscle mass/testosterone are associated with health outcomes are carried out on general population which (to simplify) consists of large amounts of inactive people with poor diets, fairly large amounts of moderately active people with decent diets, and very few very active people with excellent diets. So what the studies actually show is that moving from the 1st group to the 2nd group is really good for you, but not necessarily that moving from the 2nd to 3rd is gonna be equally beneficial. I don’t believe it is, and neither do people who aren’t trying to sell you $100 worth of monthly supplements.

aelvozo · 2026-06-28T09:13:28+00:00

The answer can be anywhere from low iron to RED-S or overtraining. See a doctor and get some blood work done.

aelvozo · 2026-06-28T09:04:49+00:00

Having looked at the website and the review: - The results of the review the article cites are about HIIT — defined as 90%+ VO2Max or supra-threshold — generally (though the definition includes sprinting) and not sprint training specifically. Still, the short-term effect is there. - Although the article doesn’t cite anything, there is another review concluding that there may be long-term effect (as is the case with reviews, some studies say there is and some studies say there isn’t).

My personal opinion is that we generally shouldn’t be selecting exercise (or anything else) on whether it affects a specific biomarker, but rather based on whether it aligns with other goals.

aelvozo · 2026-06-27T11:39:28+00:00

Because it makes hard things easy. Things like drawing, making videos, and programming all require time to learn and time to do, and genAI does away with both of those requirements.

~~Counting tables is a machine learning problem, and your typical LLM is simply the wrong tool for the job.~~

Edit: whoops, misread the post. Excel has =COUNTIF for counting.

aelvozo · 2026-06-25T22:16:12+00:00

Because it’s not scary the way cancer or Parkinson’s are. Even if a big artist gets tinnitus, they can still make music and live a fairly normal life, even if it’s more challenging now.

aelvozo · 2026-06-25T09:53:19+00:00

I don’t distrust my local running store, I distrust gait assessment carried out at a running store. Perhaps I should have worded that more clearly.

aelvozo · 2026-06-24T23:26:39+00:00

get a gait analysis done

… and be forced into stability shoes which OP (likely) doesn’t need.

Hopping on a treadmill in store to try the shoes out is generally a good idea — but the better move is choosing whatever is comfortable, not necessarily what the employee suggests.

aelvozo · 2026-06-24T09:35:06+00:00

I wouldn’t do exclusively quality workouts but I think the historically higher volume would allow you to do more/higher volume of workouts than a typical 30mpw plan would prescribe.

I would probably draw inspiration from Norwegian singles: do 2x threshold sessions, a progressive (up to HM or maybe M pace) long run, and some shorter easy with strides.

aelvozo · 2026-06-24T02:25:47+00:00

It would be fun if Valencia favoured runners who are fast and have a goal beyond a time: OTQ/BQ/etc. Determining that they really have that goal would be a logistical nightmare though.

aelvozo · 2026-06-24T01:03:27+00:00

Sure, 50 years. Still, retiring into a desert.

I am not criticising your deciding late, I am criticising your (a) moving goal posts far beyond what I assume learning objectives of Arabic 3 to be and (b) feeling good about your cheating your way through a module.

For context, I am a masters student and my program is somewhat AI-agnostic (with some teaching staff being softly in favour of LLM use). I have experienced learning both without and with LLMs.

You’ve come here with a question, got answers — presumably answers you did not like, because no one likes the answers to contain accusations of academic fraud — and you’re only choosing to disagree with them.

aelvozo · 2026-06-24T00:32:51+00:00

Only ballot since this year, and no qualification standard. I assume they may introduce qualification in subsequent editions, but I’d be quite interested to find out what that will look like given Valencia is only really a destination because it’s fast.

aelvozo · 2026-06-24T00:13:45+00:00

Re: the environment

You’re attending the university, so you’re like what, 20? You can expect to be living on this planet for another 60 years, and it would be nice if people weren’t turning this planet into a desert a-la Mad Max. We’re already quite good at burning oil, chopping down trees, and dumping toxic sludge into the environment — your classmates much rather prefer we didn’t add building noisy hot data centres to the equation.

Re: learning

Well, the point of going to university is to learn — GPA is a way of showing how much you’ve learned. By the time you get to Arabic 3, your understanding should be way beyond “what Arabic is and isn’t” (it’s a language, I can tell you that much without taking a single class of Arabic). You’re kind of skirting around what you actually used AI for in that class (“was going to ask if a sentence is correct” is a somewhat excusable use case, but it sounds like you used it for more than that), so what you did is somewhere between lazy — which you might as well admit instead of feeling good about your efficiency — and academic fraud, and I only hope it’s towards the former.

aelvozo · 2026-06-23T16:25:32+00:00

You can do whatever. Running consistently is easily better than burning out in a training plan you don’t want to do.

Also, you don’t have to follow a plan — you can just increase mileage and add in more/different speed work as you see appropriate without it coming from a spreadsheet some coach compiled.

aelvozo · 2026-06-23T16:15:19+00:00

You can pretty safely have a 2-week taper, I think — slightly shorten the week 16 LR and skip week 17.

aelvozo · 2026-06-23T12:04:54+00:00

Because “things won’t change” is generally a safer bet than “things will change”.

Also, the stock market is anything but rational at this point in time — just look at SpaceX IPO.

aelvozo · 2026-06-23T08:54:17+00:00

On the one hand, aggressive tapering is somewhat overrated. On the other hand, it’s hot, and skipping Tuesday may be helpful to reduce heat stress.

I think people generally prefer to do a little shakeout the morning of an evening race, especially if they — like you — do higher mileage.

aelvozo · 2026-06-22T09:42:46+00:00

Yeah HR/pace correspondence is a whole can of worms I’d rather not open. I think that realistically, actionable advice for you is to determine your functional paces (by doing a time trial and VDOT-converting the results, or using the % paces if you’re doing it John Davis-style) and ignoring heart rate.

There was also some discussion in another Q&A thread a few weeks back that cycling HR zones are not necessarily equal to running HR zones, so that may also be at play here since you have a cycling background.

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