How to Run a 10K (and Also Half a 10K): 6 Takeaways from Nils van der Poel's Training Manifesto

Fresh off two Olympic gold medals and a world record, Nils van der Poel did something unprecedented: he released a 62-page training manifesto titled “How to Skate a 10K (and Also Half a 10K)”. Not only did the document include the three years of training that turned him into a double Olympic champion, but it also contained one of the most comprehensive (not to mention accessible and funny) explanations of training theory and physiology ever published.

Much in the same way a sequel is never as good as the original, my breakdown of this document is unlikely to do it the justice it deserves. So, if now or at any other point you would like to read the real thing, follow this link.

I should also mention that, aside from Nils’ two races in Beijing, I have never watched speed skating in my life, and if I ever tried it, I would fall over – a lot. While I understand the physiology and training theory laid out in the manifesto, I don’t know the sport and would like to apologise in advance for any speed-skating-related mistakes I might make throughout this article.

“I held myself to a high standard and I rewarded myself properly and often. When I failed, I forgave myself and tried my best not to fail again. I never felt sorry for myself, no matter the hour, wind, rain, or temperature. I volunteered to do this.” – Nils van der Poel

Nils van der Poel at the 2022 Beijing Olympics

Takeaways

#1: One size does not fit all

This document is almost universally referred to as a manifesto, and this article will be no exception. However, the word ‘manifesto’ carries many connotations that make it an inadequate descriptor here. It seems that all Nils is trying to do is explain why he trained the way he did for the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and in the first sentence he is very clear that this may not work for everyone. Contrary to the title of the document, this isn’t a how-to guide, but something between a how-I-did and an I-hope-you-can-learn-from-me guide.

This very fact is part of what makes the manifesto (yes, I am going to keep calling it this) so refreshing. Because Nils isn’t looking to make a dime/Swedish krona off his work, he can afford to be totally honest. This isn’t some proclamation that he, like so many before him, has found the one magic workout that will get you fit. This is a champion athlete acknowledging that what worked for him will work even better for some and not at all for others.

No matter what sport you partake in, this is something we should all remember. Your physiology will not respond to a training session in the same way that mine will, so while an off-the-shelf, 12-week couch-to-marathon program might be what some people are looking for, anyone who wants to perform at their best needs to acknowledge that one man’s trash really is another man’s treasure.

Case in point: Nils’ 10km world record has since been broken by a man who doesn’t train for as long as Nils did and who does the type of dry-land work Nils refused to touch.

#2: Rest is a part of training

On the opening page, there is a warning: Do not forget to stick to the Limit. The same warning closes out the document.

That capitalisation is intentional, and it seems as though Nils treated the Limit much in the same way the Bible treats the word Him. Nils is best known for his monstrous training hours, but his success is due equally, if not more, to his monstrous resting hours.

Throughout all his training seasons, Nils followed a 5-2 pattern: 5 days of training and 2 days of resting, every week. While the pattern was first put in place to allow him to go skydiving and drinking on the weekend, the psychological and physiological advantages quickly became clear. Even when he got more serious about his sport he never wavered from the 5-2.

The man himself addresses the benefits in one neat paragraph:

“The 5-2 day training program has lots of benefits – I was never more than 5 days from 2 consecutive rest days, which was a nice mental relief. But the upside to the 5-2 in the long run was not only psychological. As I rested for two days my body would get a reset. On Monday sessions I would always be well rested and ready for another hard five days. And if I weren’t well rested, if my pulse was not responding as usual or if my legs felt heavier than they usually did on a Monday session, I would take notice early. I would know that something was abnormal before it became a real issue and I would throw in some extra rest days and avoid a negative trend. As the week proceeded, I would also know how much I could push it on a Tuesday, Wednesday… and so on to still stick close to, but still on the right side of, the Limit. In short: the 5-2 made it very easy to manage the training load.”

It's worth mentioning that this model worked particularly well for Nils because, for months at a time, he would repeat the same sessions every week. A Monday session was always a Monday session, a Tuesday session was always a Tuesday session, and so he – perhaps better than any athlete in history – knew exactly how his body was meant to respond every day. The two consecutive rest days were simply a part of this very monotonous training program that yielded such great insights.

While the nuances of why this worked for Nils are quite unique to him and his sport, the benefits of resting after a hard few days of training are not. If a double Olympic champion can take more than 100 days off every year and set world records, there’s no need to stress about a work or family commitment eating into your training hours every now and again. True, on those five days he regularly clocked over 30 hours of training, so he definitely earned his rest, but the point still stands. To quote this very quotable manifesto: “If you’re listening to the body when it whispers to you, you don’t have to hear it scream.”

Pick your rest days or your body will pick them for you.

#3: Build that base

In the immortal words of Meghan Trainor: it’s all about that base.

The energy demands of all endurance sports are primarily aerobic, so it makes sense to spend most of your training time building a strong aerobic system. The broader your base, the higher you can build your pyramid.

Nils dedicated more than a year to exclusively building this base, often cycling for more than 30 hours per week while never pushing above a conversational effort.

“This season had one aim: Get. Aerobically. Fit. The 10,000m is partly an aerobic event, but I would also need the aerobic capacity in order to recover faster so that I could train more in the coming training periods. The stronger I got aerobically, the more anaerobic sessions I could do later on. I purified the aerobic season.” – Nils van der Poel

Unfortunately for us runners, we have tendons that need to be stiffened, bones that need to be loaded, and muscle activation patterns that need to be rehearsed. Cycling works especially well for speed skaters because it involves a very similar movement pattern and is a non-impact sport (assuming you can stay upright), but it’s these same reasons that make it not as effective for runners. Nils, by his own admission, was not a very good runner, despite having an aerobic energy system capable of powering the International Space Station for an entire orbit. (Not a joke – the 800,000 watt-hours he put out over his three years of training could really power this feat).

That being said, the best runners in the world are lucky to clock half the weekly training hours that Nils did, and I think this represents a big opportunity in training theory development for our sport. I’ve long thought that runners should do just enough running to maximise the skill and loading demands of their event and then supplement the rest of their workouts with non-weight-bearing activities. Since the dawn of structured running training, we have been beholden to this ceiling of orthopaedic stress above which injury and overtraining await. But just because your bones might not be able to tolerate another step, doesn’t mean you can’t boost your mitochondrial count with a few hours on an elliptical machine. Somewhere along the way we equated “running hours” to “training hours”, and I think the more we start to understand the loading requirements of distance running, the more people will see that these are two very different things.

#4: Your threshold is more important than you think (unless you already think it’s really important, in which case you’re right)

In the immortal words of Meghan Trainor’s biggest hater: it’s actually NOT all about that base.

Your aerobic base is absolutely the most important predictor of your distance running success, but if you listen to our podcast, you’ll know that we’re big-time fans of a poorly-tattooed Norwegian and his obsession with the lactate threshold, a marker almost as important as your aerobic capacity. It turns out this trait is not unique to Jakob Ingebrigtsen and extends across the Swedish-Norwegian border to Nils, who would follow his aerobic season with a threshold season.

Nils figured out that the only thing holding him back was the ability to skate thirty-second laps for twelve and a half minutes. He could already skate the thirty-second lap, and he had no problem skating for the required time, but combining the two would quite literally require a world record performance. Physiologically, this meant he had to raise his lactate threshold as high as he could, thereby making the thirty-second lap feel easier and more sustainable. Still following his 5-2 model, Nils clocked a leg-melting eight hours of threshold training every week (and a further seventeen of aerobic training) for two and a half months following his pure aerobic season, ultimately allowing him to achieve his goal and break the world record.

The same logic applies, in part, to distance running. True, any distance runner who tries to run at their threshold for eight hours a week will end up swapping the adoration of fans for the attention and concern of their doctor, but two hours of threshold running spread across four runs a week has turned Jakob Ingebrigtsen into an unstoppable force over the 5000m (an event that takes roughly the same amount of time it took Nils to skate a 10km).

This begs a similar question as before: would runners benefit from more than two hours of threshold training per week? Two hours seems to be the upper limit for most runners given the orthopaedic load of operating at or near your threshold, but if Nils can respond positively to four times as much threshold training as Ingebrigtsen, then surely there is room for a runner to, for example, add an additional hour or two of threshold work with some cross-training. The movement patterns won’t be as specific, but restricting your training load just because you’ve hit your weekly mileage cap might see you leave some metabolic adaptations on the table.

#5: You get good at what you train

The rise of social media has given extra credence to fitness fads and trends that seem to only be adopted by the recreational athlete. As Nils explains, “if you need to stretch then go ahead and bend over. But do not fool yourself; do not drop hours from the essential sessions to perform something that sounds cool or is easy.”

I listened to a podcast that asked the world’s best triathletes what they do for recovery, and they said, “eating and sleeping.” It’s easy to get wrapped up in the marginal gains, but one percenters are just that: one percenters. Train hard and often and rest hard and often, and you will be 99 percent of the way there.

Nils’ coach agrees, explaining that “It’s not about the guy who doesn’t eat dessert; it’s not that guy who wins. It doesn’t have to do with that…it has so much to do with the workload you can do. You have to get the training done.”

Building on this idea, Nils created the following hypothesis to inform his training:

“The main idea was that you will become good at whatever it is that you train. The idea was that whoever skated the most laps of 30.0 during the last three months prior to the competition would win the 10k. My preseason basically had two aims: (1) build the capacity to be able to skate a lap of 30.0 and (2) build a good recovery so that I could skate a 30.0 as often as possible.” – Nils van der Poel

Interestingly, Nils never skated slower than race pace when he got on the ice, believing his technique would be contaminated by skating at any other speed. The mechanical difference, while subtle, is real, and Nils didn’t want any neurological hangover compromising his efficiency.

This raises another interesting question for distance runners. The physiological and orthopaedic loading advantages of easy runs have long been clear, but do they come at the expense of proper technique? A five-minute kilometre and a three-minute kilometre are not run with the same mechanics, so is it possible, as Nils posits, that training at slow speeds can compromise your technique come race day?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you go and run all your workouts at race pace. Again, running is not speed skating, and the high impact of our sport would cripple anyone who tried this strategy. Still, from a skill-acquisition standpoint, it could be worth balancing the need to load our tendons and bones with the need to avoid poor mechanics. This is an area of running training philosophy yet to be studied, so right now it’s just speculation: however, future training schedules could see portions of easy running being swapped for cross-training methods far enough removed from running so as to not confuse our neural pathways, and tools like the AlterG Treadmill could be used to allow athletes to train at their threshold heart rate while moving their legs at race pace. Would this be useful? Maybe, maybe not. Unfortunately, it’s still unknown if this contamination is a big enough problem to warrant a shift in how we train.

#6: Get a good coach

This is more one for the coaches than the athletes, but if an athlete recognises any of these flaws within their coach, it is my advice (well, now it is, having read Nils’ thoughts on the matter) to find someone new.

In writing this section, I tried to summarise this part of the manifesto as I have done in the other five sections, but I could never find a way to express this idea better than Nils did. So, for our final takeaway, please enjoy the Olympic champion’s very unfiltered thoughts on the coach-athlete relationship:

“As a junior skater I would sometimes argue about the faults of my coach instead of discussing the possibilities to improve the training program. I would argue his lack of knowledge instead of arguing my motivation to achieve a different course of action. This was a dangerous path to take. Because I would only win the argument if he was wrong, and if he was wrong, he lost the argument and so he became a loser, and so the coach became a loser, and so my closest support became a loser, and I was the one who made him lose. Later on, the loser would want his revenge and so we did not reward one another properly. Instead, I had a concealed game going on that went something like “find flaws in him to confirm that I’m right about him being wrong”. Not quite optimal for a team. I think the situation occurred because we did not clearly pronounce who was in charge of what and who had the authority to make which call.

In recent years I never argued that my coach was wrong, but sometimes I argued that I had another idea that I, for reasons A and B, was more motivated to execute (note: more motivated to execute is not always the same thing as physiologically superior). Sometimes my coach would agree that my way was better and sometimes he wouldn’t. However, it was clear between us that I was always granted the final decision. Sometimes when we disagreed, I went my way, neglecting the advice of my coach. Sometimes his arguments exceeded mine and I thanked him explicitly for teaching me, and so I went his way. If the both of us had good arguments and I didn’t care too much which way we proceeded, I would always go his way. In this manner I confirmed my trust in him so that, when I wanted to do things my way, he showed his trust for me and supported me. In this manner, neither me nor my coach ever felt like we lost an argument and instead we were a winning team.

To some people this way of working might seem manipulative, to me it wasn’t. Both my coach and I applied the same strategy to meet the common goal. It was not manipulation, but cooperation. My coach had knowledge of training and experience I did not possess, but I felt and knew my body [and mind(!)] in a way that he could never do. I always tried to make rational decisions whilst training, not to push it when I needed rest but neither not pushing it enough because I was mentally weak and came up with excuses. Sometimes the right decision was to abort a session. As soon as I made the call to abort a session, I no longer had to endure the gruelling challenge of the hard work, but neither did I want to be a quitter. It is impossible to make a good and independent call in these situations, and the assessment of my coach was very valuable for me and my confidence in myself

 I have never skated a 10k without questioning why I chose to become a speed skater. It always sucked with 10 laps to go, but working harder would only result in me blowing up too early. Every time I skated the 10k I was in doubt of my ability. This is why I considered the 10k to be The Distance. The King's distance. What I needed from my coach during the race was confidence. I told him prior to races what I wanted him to say to me as I skated. He said things like “You’re so good”, “looking strong”, and “I believe in you”, which made me feel more confident. He avoided saying things like “Come on, push it!” because it just made me feel as if I was not pushing it at the moment, which I of course was. Another interesting thing I’ve been told by coaches throughout the years, during high-intensity sessions, is “You’re not trying good enough”. Nothing ever made me less motivated or angrier than hearing that. If a coach considers his athlete not to try hard enough the solution is not to blame the athlete and make him feel guilty but instead inspire the athlete and cheer him on. I needed my coach to ease my burden, not load it. My coach was very good when it came to easing my burden, not only during training, but also in life. He was the best friend I ever had.” – Nils van der Poel