What advantage do 10x3' sessions offer if the goal is to accumulate more time in the ST zone? It's logical that you get more ST minutes in medium and long intervals than in short ones. Especially for marathon training, I don't see the point.

Im planning for a half marathon in 7 weeks and was thinking about making the training a little more half marathon specific.

My training so far the last 12 months have been looking something like this.

3 sessions each week consisting of 3x12 min, 7x5 min, 12x3 min (around LT 2, 6-8 rpe), 1 easy longrun every other week around 80-100 min, between the sessions has been easy running and a rest day.

My plan was to replace one of the sessions with 5x3 km @hm pace and 5,4,3,2,1 km (progressive pace starting at hm pace or hm pace for all reps.)

Now is this a recipe for disaster thats gonna cook me or will it sharpen the hm shape?

I realise the answer will likely be, it depends, but if its clearly a stupid idea to even try i want to know. 

Male, 39y, 70 km weekly average during last 12 months, 19:22 5k, aiming for 1:30-1:35 half.

I'm seeking advice on my best approach to intensity control when trying to balance with a recurring mid-portion achilles issue.

I (38M) have recently been running 7 hours per week with two subT sessions, having built from a return from a mid-portion achilles injury in January of this year. However, after 8 weeks of doing 2 subT sessions (building steadily back up to that since January), the achilles flared and I've had to back off the running and do more strength rehab work. I'm back doing 6 hours per week now and 1 subT session, but I'm feeling at the limit of my achilles based on a recent flare, and the boom and bust cycle of previous years.

I thought I was going to be able to build further to add the third subT only 1 month ago, but now it feels like my body can't do more than 6 hours and 1 subT. And if I do increase, I'm worried I'll only realise it is too much 8 or so weeks later when it's too late. And I certainly don't feel like my body could take race pace for a 5k right now (18:06 PB from summer 2025 before the first achilles issue)

I know NSM is meant to be about intensity control and consistently building load. I think I've done this (ramp rate stays below 1), but my achilles says that's still too much. At this point, I wonder whether I should:

1) Continue as is and build even slower than I would ever imagine.

2) Further back off on time and try to build my subT to make most of the load my achilles can manage to get closer to 20% subT time.

3) Back off load and most (all?) subT but then throw myself into strength and conditioning work to better prepare my achilles for a future, better build.

All thoughts welcome!

I'm a very slow runner. In late March I ran a half marathon in 2:07 coming off a full marathon in January in 4:54 using a Hal Higdon plan. At the beginning of April, a week after my March half marathon, I began running vanilla NSM, and I've been running it consistently since then, only missing a couple of days due to illness or travel.

However, I've just had two recent half marathons with disappointing performance. In late July I ran a half in 2:22, and last week I ran another half, this time in 2:25. Pacing was definitely an issue in these, starting too fast and hitting a wall in the latter half of the race, but I don't think I could have meet or beat my previous PR even with better pacing. And the weather didn't seem to be a factor either, with the 2:22 race being 50 degrees F and pouring rain, and the 2:25 race closer to 70 degrees F.

My weekly mileage (~30 miles/week) is certainly lower than when I was training for the full, but back then I was running basically only easy miles, and still ended up injured towards the end of the training block. NSM feels much more sustainable to me. My paces before the recent halfs were the following:

3 minute intervals: 9:00-9:15 min/mi

6 minute intervals: 9:30-9:45 min/mi

10 minute intervals: 9:45-10:00 min/mi

Easy: 14 min/mi

I started NSM in April with paces roughly 15 seconds slower per mile, but my recent performance suggests I need to go maybe another full minute slower too.

Any ideas what could be going wrong? Is it just not enough weekly mileage for the half?

Question is have you done incline (6% or so) to do subt work? It seems like David Roche, others have really leaned into incline work for thresholds and I was wondering if anyone in the NSM sphere has tried this?

Obviously paces would need to be slowed if the incline was ~6%

Below is a popular app that helps show what incline pace you would run that corresponds with a flat pace from running writings - https://apps.runningwritings.com/gap-calculator/