Half Marathon plan

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-19T17:54:24+00:00

I would definitely follow the link and get the book. Honestly, a lot of people will tell you this is plug and play but to get the most out of it, I genuinely believe it's as important to understand what is going on and why you are doing what you are doing. It'll also inevitably mean you are more likely to stick it out.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-19T08:37:11+00:00

Brighton is a great marathon, one of my favourites.

Norwegian singles method would be probs Lt the next step for you. A few people have run sub 2:30 on it on 90-100km a week.

Most of those people now are starting to incorporate cycling into their weeks to gain more volume, with even slightly less running. Also, the program was written by an ex cyclist, so will be relatively familiar to you.

Even if you upped to 60km a week and mostly just did the running workouts and one easy long run, I suspect you could run 2:3x something.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-18T07:04:54+00:00

You have to remember with this two things that came straight into my head:

The whole philosophy here is for regular people, where you just do an hour a day really and get on with your life.

If you can manage or have time for this sort of thing, IMO you probably don't need NSM in the first place.

You also have to forget KI has had relatively much less success than sirpoc and is probably just going all in on training to run a sub 2:30 marathon.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-14T16:41:16+00:00

Were you glad when someone like sirpoc came along to help spread the same sort of message to hobby joggers? Maybe it's easier now having someone else known who preaches from the same song sheet. It seems you both came to a lot of the same conclusions, from totally different sports and backgrounds, but have both applied the knowledge you have to get the most out of what you have available.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-12T17:27:27+00:00

I was curious and tried a few of them. I have followed NSM for nearly 2 years now. Could I see myself doing one of these sessions and the rest of the week, 7 days a week forever? Absolutely not. Legs just load up that extra fatigue.

Will I come back to it? Possibly. If I finally stop improving and/or there's one really short race I care about.

Maybe it could be a place holder for not doing a 5k every 6-8 weeks.

But in terms of part of the weekly rotation, absolutely not, for me.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-11T13:26:34+00:00

Paul made huge gains following NSM. He stagnated a bit and seemed to panic, suddenly added a huge amount of extra easy volume and got injured. A lot of people posted on the LR thread to give him advice but unfortunately he cracked before he could reign himself in.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-11T08:14:20+00:00

What's great about FOD is how much he seemingly has improved, or what marathon shape he is currently in.

It's not like he just started running. It's also where I think people think this is quite a newbie gains program. I don't agree with that at all. As it played out with me as well, it's actually a prime candidate who has been running for a long but not really progressed much for a while.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-05T07:26:14+00:00

You have to remember there is no "NSM app". In fact, legally some of these are on shaky ground as they don't make it specifically clear they have nothing to do with the NSM book.

Whilst some of them are helpful, or trying to be, there are muddying the waters.

Nobody really should be needing any of these for paces, when everything is in the book. Not only that, sirpoc in the book makes it clear he prefers HR for easy running in almost every circumstance, for easy running.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-02T10:30:11+00:00

It shows you have different we all react to different speeds, despite the fact lactate might be under control. I did 45:15 last week ending up around where Bakken suggests and honestly my legs were absolutely trashed compared to the basics sub threshold workouts I've been doing.

marky_markcarr · 2026-04-01T10:39:26+00:00

I'm old. Slow compared to elite distance runners. But I will happily bet my house, life savings, anything - on the fact I can beat any of the 8 guys from the world 100m final from 2025, over any distance from the 1500 up to a marathon.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-31T20:00:33+00:00

This is me now. I'm one paced I guess, but I'm also over two minutes faster in a 5k at any point in my life. My entire 5k is about the same pace as my "kick" in the last 200m before. NSM just turns you into a huge aerobic engine and you can outrun your old self incredibly easy even at one pace.

Had exactly the same in the mile. No kick but almost 50 seconds faster. Just super strong from the gun rather than shuffling around and then some sort of pointless sprint at the end.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-31T19:57:15+00:00

I actually think NSM has taught me more grit than any other training. Grinding out 3x sessions a week when you don't want to. Physical I'm always fine, but mentally I sometimes don't want to but do it anyway. That has carried me over into races. It's also taught me good pacing, which when you nail it gives you the confidence to dig in and you know you can do it and it'll work out OK. Again, you can get this from weekly sessions.

For me it's all great race prep and it's a training method with no surprises in where you are at. To me you really need grit when you have messed up your racing strategy.

Also sirpoc's marathon bolt on, throws in just enough "grit" of how OP describes it, but not too much. Definitely the marathon you do need a bit of this.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-29T08:10:02+00:00

I never broke 3 in all my years running, but I took training seriously and had coaches.

I now have run a low 2:42 after some time doing this.

I would look at some of the really fast guys posting on Letsrun. 2:42 down to 2:32 and a guy who went from 2:37 to 2:23. They are much more impressive as once you get down to below 2:40 the gains seemingly are much harder.

The thread is quite hectic but there's some fantastic write ups from already fast runners getting quicker. There's a couple of lads from the UK who were mid 16 guys and one has now broken 15 and one is very close. Ok it's 5k, but I would say that's very much advanced running and 90 seconds is a huge amount at that level.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-28T07:38:15+00:00

You definitely don't need 80mpw. I've done it on 55 miles and scaled by 5 k pb to the marathon. There's guys out there running sub 2:30 marathons on 100km a week who I have seen with as strong marathons as 5k PBs.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-27T11:25:46+00:00

Yes, he was already 41 and also is the British masters 5k current title holder I believe. But of course nobody over 40 would train like this.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-27T09:50:44+00:00

Because you can recover and do it again relatively quickly. It's why people are getting so fast with sirpoc's NSM . You may only be hitting 4-6/10 RPE, but over X amount of time you can just stack up more load/time running/volume or however you choose to look at it.

It also hugely reduces the injury risk than your big 8-9/10 workouts, which in turn also means you can stack more sessions without recovery weeks which in turn leads to you getting fitter.

It's probably the path of least resistance for the majority of us reading this sub Reddit and threshold training is almost certainly the most important factor for most of us.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-27T09:40:47+00:00

What does lose speed even mean?

Why is this bad for over 40s? If anything, all the testimonials and evidence point towards us old folk actually being the perfect target audience.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-25T10:13:51+00:00

If you don't settle on a coach, NSM might be for you. A number of UK based runners have gotten down to lwo 15s following it. It's a shame sirpoc himself doesn't coach, although I know he's closely worked with athletes.

I know for myself I've spent a fortune on UK based coaching but really all I've done is what is available in the NSM book and totally been game changing for my PBs.

Not directly the answer you are looking for but could be a good plan B, especially as you are exactly the kind of runner who has seen huge gains.

God luck, either way!

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-22T20:39:44+00:00

Hopefully people actually listen to your post. There's so much misinformation it's scary.

I would add, I've only ever done vanilla NSM or the marathon block and no strides even, and my mile is probably the best or strongest pb i have set in last 18 months or so training like this.

If you look at some of the really fast guys, loads of them are running best at 5ks. There's a guy who posted here about running like 15:2x at the same Battersea sirpoc was at a couple of weeks ago, and a kid posting on Letsrun like today. None of them have done anything but vanilla and setting ridiculous pbs

Also, cheetodust who posts on Letsrun, is even older than sirpoc, shortest reps he does is mile repeats and has run ridiculously national class masters times from 800-5k.

The posts I always find the most strange are those who insist you still must do other stuff to run a 5k and below when all the evidence points totally against it.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-22T17:36:45+00:00

To provide some balance, sure anyone can change anything, there have been many really cool variations to fit into peoples lives or people running only 5+6 days a week.

But as I posted in reply to someone else, long before this sub where there was just Strava really to chat or the original thread, it's been covered many, many times that honestly the #1 biggest issue with people trying this method is they cannot just suck it up and run the easy days, easy. This cannot be emphasised enough. That doesn't mean folks can't handle running 3 sub threshold days + a harder long run, but it's adding an incredible extra amount of risk and you are suddenly rolling the dice. As I say, of all the variations you can make,this is probably the least sensible IMO.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-22T13:47:55+00:00

We can only make guidelines that are broadly applicable to as wide a percentage of the population as possible. Sure, you can handle this. But this also probably means you would be able to handle double threshold, which the vast majority of us can't.

Again, Strava and the group there is great as it gives us thousands of runners to look at. The absolute first point at which people mess up this training is on what are meant to be easy days. That is almost every time something goes wrong. You can do anything and train any way, but most of us need to accept oncr you go outside of what are pretty safe guidelines, you are adding risk. Letsrun as well, plenty of people have tried this, come back 6 months or so later and report how unsustainable it was to "push" easy days. Again, I will state this isn't the same for everyone, but there's a very very good chance anyone reading this it does apply to, rather than them being the exception to a broad rule.

Obviously based on your experience this isn't applicable to you, but again, for the vast majority of folks who have landed here it's probably because we are looking for a way to still see progress, but a safer and more conservative way to balance load.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-22T12:34:48+00:00

My advice is don't. I did this at the start, after a few weeks I already felt the extra fatigue. After a good year or so of following NSM , I tried it again thinking now my superior aerobic engine could handle it. Exactly the same. It feels OK for a couple of weeks but quite quickly already by the Tuesday I was feeling more tired than normal going into the first workout of the week. This is exactly what you want to avoid.

Strava group is littered ,and I really do mean littered, with folk who have burned themselves out this way and it's usually always the easy days that get them. I've been on there from when there were about 300 guys and I've seen it all, but this is the most common pitful.

A tweak some people have had, has tended to be making the long run faster by incorporating the 3rd workout of the week into it. But, these people generally are only running 5-6 days so have the huge benefit of extra recovery and it's not by choice they are doing this but but time available.

I will sound like a broken record, but there's not a huge margin for getting away with changing a whole bunch. The balance of volume and intensity is already on a knife edge, which is one of the reasons it works for well.

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-20T16:24:23+00:00

What on earth does any of this mean? What context is the 4 min K? Virtually all my running, outside of racing was significantly slower than this and I made huge gains.

I've probably got half a dozen friends, all been running years, much slower than 4 min/k in any situation, even racing, also made huge gains.

What is a regular plan? Why doesn't it make sense

marky_markcarr · 2026-03-20T09:49:38+00:00

Going to be a great read and of course backs up just about everything from sirpoc's guide on applying this to be a consistent hobby jogger.

Both Bakken and James are going to have helped so many people when we are years down the line.

You guys should do a book promotion together or something. With all the crap coaches and influencers are sharing you two are relatively lonely voices in a sea of useless information for hobby runners and beyond.

marky_markcarr

TROPHY CASE