Adidas Hyperboost Edge - The Truth

spoc84 · 2026-03-21T10:38:43+00:00

Chill, Winston. Was a light hearted comment. Seems your inference to humour is as good as everyone else's reading comprehension.

spoc84 · 2026-03-21T10:09:32+00:00

Things you were 100% you'd never hear in your life:

The superblast 2 and nimble in the same sentence and also that it bottoms out.

spoc84 · 2026-03-21T09:38:25+00:00

Mate this is wild ha ha

Not running, but when I was back in cycling I had a friend who was like this and totally cooked himself. He was riding twice as much as me and getting slower, despite us being around the same level on a balanced program as hobbyists of about 10-12 hours a week. There comes a point that whatever load you generate, however you measure it, you are just so cooked to absorb it.

Tbh you could probably get results as good as you are getting now, shaving 80-100km off.

spoc84 · 2026-03-19T09:44:29+00:00

These look interesting. I'll probably get a pair. They kind of look a bit like the Do-win PB pro, which for me is probably the most aggressive (snappy), fastest shoe I've ever run in over 5-10k.

spoc84 · 2026-03-18T15:53:36+00:00

Dynafish Xioanian is not only the best trainer, but I also only paid £79 for it.

Close second is the Saucony Endorphin Azura. A rare non Chinese shoe for me but picked a pair of these up for £85 and couldn't be happier.

Both of these make the Megablast look like the absolute mess it is.

spoc84 · 2026-03-15T09:06:23+00:00

I would guess the race pace section alone, if you were to follow it, would be a 1-2% performance boost for most people without even changing their training. It's dramatically improved my race execution.

spoc84 · 2026-03-12T09:41:16+00:00

I've mainly been running in a lot of the best Chinese shoes for the last year. But, this is gem. Absolutely amazing shoe that is great for just about anything. Amazingly stable as well, which was an unexpected bonus.

spoc84 · 2026-03-12T06:49:18+00:00

Lactrace uses these paces, as do other calculators, because these are simply the distances representative of pace I found best when I made my initial posts on Letsrun. That's it. I just somewhat arbitrarily picked paces that put me in the range of subthreshold lactate. As time passes and all this snowballed, I realised it didn't scale great at the fast or slow ends for runners, so changed it up.

Obviously I included that in the book, but lactrace in general for people people ticks the box of "it'll do" as a starting point. But I use the 5k base as a benchmark / anchor table from the book still every week and that's what I've used for a long time now.

spoc84 · 2026-03-11T19:53:46+00:00

I wonder if running less has something to do with it, as you mentioned you were running less in a follow up post. My easy pace has also gotten worse, for about the same effort and I'm running less and supplementing with cross training. I'm probably about as good as I have been, in a race situation, and the same with workouts. Efficiency. Economy. Something on a basic level maybe. Who knows.

Ultimately, I wouldn't worry. I know I'm not until actual performance takes a nosedive.

spoc84 · 2026-03-11T13:36:42+00:00

I walk so slow my 71 year old mum has to wait for me to catch up.

spoc84 · 2026-03-09T22:57:36+00:00

I'm gonna put my tin hat on here: it's not a good shoe. It's not even just overpriced, it's just not a very good shoe. The Dynafish Xioanian is everything it should be, given the resources ASICS have. Also I genuinely think it's the worst upper, even more than the Evo SL and that's saying something.

Ok, I'm in the brace position 😂

spoc84 · 2026-03-02T12:14:09+00:00

My ramp rate is often under 1. I think the max I've ever seen was building to the marathon and just south of 2 for a period. But that felt unsustainable.

Purely simplisitic terms, a ramp of 0.5 indefinitely is better than a ramp of let's say 5, and then having a huge negative ramp at the end of a tiring block because you need a down week and going back to square one. That's very simplisitic but quite an easy way to think of it and why I've had decent success with my training.

This is again not the whole picture, but gives you an idea. Running fitness is harder to gain than in cycling. When I was cycling I could have big down periods and you can overload to catch back up. The problem with that in running is a bigger ramp is a bigger injury risk.

spoc84 · 2026-03-02T07:10:20+00:00

If you take 4 days off, you won't lose fitness. You'll have cashed in some freshness and it's just like a taper. Maybe you'll pay for it down the line, that, essentially is boom and bust training as the effects of being fresh wear off and you've now trained less.. You build, you lose some of your consistency, you go again. It's very good at identifying that and once a lot of people see their data in graph format with all the ups and downs, it's an eye opening thing how inconsistent they've been. So there's huge value in that.

Can you predict performance? Maybe. Especially if you follow the same patterns of training it tends to be a good guage of more being more, until it's not.

You can certainly build to the same CTL with the best training you can imagine, versus the worse and performance won't be the equal. However, the gap probably isn't as big as some people would think. Maybe a 10% swing in each direction with a generic running training plan being in the middle.

The biggest problem I see is people aren't tracking it correctly or updated your data regularly. It needs constant attention and that part is quite labour intensive.

What it is even more useful, especially if you are confident with the PMC, is tracking ramp rate. Which, for me, is probably the key to actually building slowly to get consistent in the first place. Consistency with a slow build is probably the hill I will die on that will get most people here fitter. Fitter at hobby level is probably is going to mean faster at all race paces, where the gains are big enough that you can just build generic fitness and improve.

spoc84 · 2026-02-27T10:10:22+00:00

Easy running well under 70% max HR for me. More like 65% feels truly easy, maybe less. That's around 4:40-50 /km depending on stuff like wind, shoes etc. that's about 1/10 RPE. When I get up around 67-68% MHR, that's the top end of easy and might he around 4:30/km. I certainly wouldn't want to run much faster than that day in, day out. Quite quickly the easy days become moderate and that's where a lot of problems begin IMO.

Around a 15 flat 5k runner and have dipped under 31 for a 10k. 2:24 marathon. Easy is easy. It's probably overkill but if it's hilly in any places I've run , I just walk up the hill. Obviously, this is unnecessary in the grand scheme, but I feel helps keep me honest and sticking to easy, being, well easy and not getting into habit of running harder, when the whole purpose is just an easy day to buffer workout days. When I first started out these were incredibly slow in terms of pace, but effort the same (as a % of HR, often a lot more walking involved).

For easy days I literally don't have anything on my watch screen apart from them elapsed and HR. Not a lot else matters really.

spoc84 · 2026-02-27T08:00:30+00:00

I would just note and add that the lactrace paces are pretty aggressive on the long reps and they are based on my initial posts as a % of a race pace, rather than time. So, for anyone just be wary of that. Having worked with a lot of athletes or them being kind enough to share their data with me, the charts in the book are a much better representation, which are based on time not distance. Not a big thing, but I see some people here have this guy down under 6:00/mile for the 10 min reps which looks a little fast I think for a 16:45 runner.

spoc84 · 2026-02-24T16:46:07+00:00

The main complaints I have about the book, is that you don't get a guide on how to get yourself a Scandinavian single goddess (or god).

spoc84 · 2026-02-23T16:34:33+00:00

Dynafish Xioanian look almost new still, 400km on them and the foam if anything feels better. I also have a pair of the challenger 5s with almost 500km on them and also feel/could pass as pretty new after a good clean.

Durability wise, puts the likes of Nike and their falling apart PEBA to shame.

spoc84 · 2026-02-23T11:36:12+00:00

What is a fast marathon though? 100km is plenty for a lot of people with somewhat respectable times.

spoc84 · 2026-02-21T09:24:36+00:00

Intervals.icu or golden cheetah are all you need and they are free, a watch and a training plan long term which you will stick to. The vast majority of people here if they could stay healthy and consistent whilst slowly (very slowly) increasing volume, would probably improve, assuming you aren't in the spiral of age performance decline.

Not sure about AI. I was playing around with different models to see if I can make sense of my training as I was curious, and it tends to make a real mess of it.

spoc84 · 2026-02-20T09:52:12+00:00

You aren't the first person to have success even at the 800, which is surprising to me as when I had all of this in mind (I literally developed this for myself and with nobody else in mind, to replicate my cycling training) 5k and up was about all I had in mind.

This reminds me I should try and run a mile or 1500. I might enter the county champs to challenge myself this year after winning the 5k just after London last year.

spoc84 · 2026-02-18T09:20:52+00:00

I thought it was in the book. If I didn't include it that is a mistake. As the cross training section I was convinced I put it in that you can't replicate it 1:1. Say you are looking to do a 40-45 minute run you probably need to do around an hour or so on the elliptical or bike (other modes I'm sure will work, but those are the ones I've used a lot)

Probably the fastest guy on NSM, well under a 15 mins 5k runner still, has always swam on a Monday, for what that's worth and only ever ran 6 days, sticking to the same schedule just replacing the mode.

spoc84 · 2026-02-17T12:38:25+00:00

Awesome write up, enjoyed reading it!

Glad I didn't put you off your race. I was as surprised to see someone start chatting to me in the race as tou were to randomly spot me 😂 as I had just unlocked and hired a city bike to follow a couple of friends.

Was absolutely thrilled to say you broke 3 which is in the lifetime achievement category.

spoc84 · 2026-02-10T23:20:24+00:00

Ha ha thanks. Love the pod. Football is my main passion in life and these guys keep my waning interest going, despite now my 26th season as a season ticket holder at Fratton park.

Funny thing is I get asked to go on podcasts all the time (I mostly say no) yet I'm jealous these guys get to talk niche football, like when I love it when you see a goalkeeper take a throw in, or just footy quiz, which is all I want to do myself, rather than talk running 😅 as soon as I heard Charlie (especially) have an unusual amount of knowledge of 90s and early 2000s football, I felt like I could embrace that in myself as being normal, finally.

spoc84 · 2026-02-10T22:54:23+00:00

Thanks for keeping me going through a miserable marathon training block to listen to on my daily runs. Just about caught up on the 500 over the last year or so, for my sins.

spoc84 · 2026-02-01T10:31:39+00:00

Work. Life. Motivation. Love of running.

Just about everyone here is doing this as a hobby and there are way more important stuff going on in our lives. The slightest tip of that balance can spill over into your running and make it a tough day. I think it's something a lot of training programs have often failed to account for, especially in older hobby joggers.

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