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I was looking for information that would improve my training in comparison with my previous 49 marathons. In my opinion Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas gives more, better guidance which helped me to break 3 hours. I bought this book in preparation for my 50th marathon. This book really did not provide the guidance that I was looking for.
The book helped me clarify my own approach to running schedules, which I term "flexibility". In summary, the idea is to use the schedule as an outline of what you plan to do, but adapt it to your own experience as you work with it. I recommend this book to competitive runners and elite athletes. I am neither, but like all runners am interested in running faster. By adapting his aggressive schedules to our own needs we can maximize the benefits of our training. This means adapting the schedule to the way your body responds each week, each day, even each run if need be.
For plodders like me, it has value in understanding more of why we are plodders and how we can choose to change this. Brad Hudson is an experienced coach, working mostly with elite athletes and competitive runners as far as I can tell. The solid basis he provides for his schedules I found very helpful, but the actual schedules were of only limited value to me.For me, the best thing about the book is his concept of adaptive running schedules. "Adaptive" is a more appropriate terminology than "flexible", since it implies adapting the schedule to fit your body's needs, rather than just changing it randomly.
I am a novice runner who wants faster times at the half marathon and 10K. The FIRST program -- "Run Less/Run Faster" is a more beneficial book to me. This book is good if you are a fairly serious runner. While this book does provide some insights, the anecdotes were tiresome and this book really did not provide the guidance that I was looking for.
I couldn't put it down. 'Run Faster' offered me something the others didn't in that it offered a unique training concept in 'adaptive training.' Another plus were the profiles of Brad's athletes (Olympian Dathan Ritzenhein and US 1/2 marathon champ James Carney to name two of his athletes) at the end of each chapter. I bought Run Faster over the summer after seeing Brad Hudson was the author. I have been interested in distance running training theory since I started running in High School and have read a lot of books on the topic. I recommend this book to any runner looking for a fresh and new approach to their training.
He has also given deep insights as what it takes to be a great athlete for an athlete of any ability and how to improve year after year, a knowledge previously held only by top national coaches and not available in one place. Brad Hudson's training philosophy is not one size fits all kind, as every athlete and runner is different, he articulately shows how based on a template training plan one can do adaptive training, where runners can modify their workouts based on how physiologically they are feeling on the day of running. In all a wonderful training book that can open your mind to lot of useful new information and change your training forever. This book in my opinion conveys what I've been looking for all over the internet, blogs, forums. It describes cutting edge training methods that are used by current elite athletes but explained in a way that a runner with lesser experience can get quite a lot from it. He also gives out various training plan templates for athletes of varying abilities and methodology for readers to devise their own training plan once they understand all the principles for adaptive training written in this book.
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