The marketing sounds great – train less, run faster. The FIRST Training system is one which Runner’s World first promoted in 2005 then followed up with a book. I was lent it in 2012 by a parkrunner who reckoned it was great and I quickly devoured my way through it.
My gut feel after reading was it worked for many of their testimonial runners because it found a mid ground which many runners don’t fall into. You either have dedicated runners who are doing too many workouts and running too fast on their easy days; or recreational runners who simply do all their training at the same pace. With the dedicated runners, FIRST would give them more recovery by getting them to do less. With the recreationals, it would get them running faster instead of jogging around to log miles.
A couple of years on I decided to give FIRST training a try, this followed my unsuccessful months of MAF training. I had ended that when I began to go backwards and became concerned I was somehow overtrained. To try and alleviate the effects I did less and less training during the dark months and things just got worse. With hindsight the idea I was overtrained was a preposterous notion. I’d read the words in Maffetone’s book about anaerobic training, read elsewhere about over-reaching and was prepared to believe my sluggish performance and rising heart-rates were a sign of this. Certainly it’s possible to fit my symptoms to the descriptions of overtraining and this is the danger of reading words in a book rather than talking to some who knows. (This seems a good opportunity to plug my Training Reviews if you think you might want a check-up!)
So with its three runs per week FIRST training seemed like a perfect compromise for getting me back into serious running while allowing decent amounts of recovery.
FIRST training stands for Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training. It is a method create by two long-time triathletes who were finding it difficult to fit the demands of training for three disciplines into their busy lives. What they found was they could cut their training down to three runs each week and still produce good race times. They then followed this up with a study of twenty-five runners – fifteen of whom recorded marathon PBs.
The three runs in the FIRST system are an interval session, a tempo run and a long run at marathon pace. Looking closely at their programme now, I see how I trained was only an approximation of FIRST training as all their workouts have different distances over the weeks. Their intervals range from 400m to a mile, tempo runs from 3-8 miles, long runs build up to 20 miles for the marathon. I simply did kilometre reps, a 20min threshold run and a 10 mile long run that grew to 14 as I got fitter.
What’s hidden in the details of the original FIRST promotions, but stated more clearly later, on is that it’s a 3+2 system. Three runs with two cross-training workouts lasting 40-45mins. This is another reason why I was only doing an approximation of it; I didn’t have the inclination to cross-train. On the flipside, my coaching commitments meant I often jogged a couple of very easy miles on a Tuesday evening and I was still a keen parkrunner so did a 30-minute 4th run each week at Bournemouth parkrun.
All in it I wouldn’t begin to claim this was a scientific approach to evaluating FIRST training’s effectiveness but I certainly got a flavour of it.
Re-evaluating FIRST training now a decade on with a better understanding of running, I think it has some very strong points. The range of workout distances is great because these implicitly challenge the runner over a variety of paces. Your 400m efforts will naturally be paced quicker than mile efforts. The downside of FIRST’s workouts is a lack of clear progression. The distances seem to jump around and I couldn’t identify a pattern other than for the long runs. When I coach, I like to progress in a logical fashion, You take the runner from point A to Z with points B, C, D etc clear to see.
There is one notable failing if you follow FIRST training accurately and that is the idea of doing two days cross-training each week. Why not just do easy recovery runs at the correct pace on those days? While there may be some benefit carrying over from cross-training, going swimming or cycling isn’t going to produce the same benefit you would get from running. The principle of specificity tells us the best way to build running fitness is by running. Even running on a treadmill isn’t going to provide exactly the same benefits as running outdoors where you will race.
My experience was that I enjoyed the training. I always felt strong and ready to run when I got to the workouts. This is probably the thing which stands out in my memory about it. It was enjoyable and I got myself back up to fitness with it.
The results were decent enough although I didn’t really have a benchmark to test against but I saw the workouts getting quicker and heart-rates getting lower.
For example, my 5K tempo runs began in January at 24:30 with heart-rates in the mid-170s and maxing in the 180s. By the end of March, they were down to 22:30 with heart-rates in the low 160s and maxing in the low 170s. The route I followed had a long uphill in the 2nd kilometre then after that the remainder was a gradual down. This led to uneven splits and needing to gauge my efforts by breathing but in the early weeks the fastest kilometres were around 5min/km (8min/mile) and by the end they were sub-7, that is about 4:18/km.
Likewise my 5x1K intervals went from totalling around 21:30 (avg 4:18/km) down to 19:45 (3:57). A decent improvement over three months.
My long runs began on a ten mile route averaging 9:18/mile and by the end they were around 8:30/mile on a longer fourteen mile route.
Those are decent improvements albeit only getting me somewhere closer to where I’d been a year before. Of course, MAF training had taken its toll and, at least I now felt like the days of overtraining had been banished and I could get back on with training.
The one negative for me was I didn’t like running only three days per week. By the time I got to mid-March I was ready to do more running. I had to talk myself into sticking with the programme for a couple more weeks so that I could feel I’d given it a decent shot. Compared to MAF it was night and day. I got tired of MAF because I wasn’t seeing any tangible results and I was forever trudging round holding back on my pace. With FIRST I was holding back on how often I went running but every time I did run I enjoyed it and felt like I was improving. Trouble is, I just wanted more.
Once April came around, I went back to running six days per week. What I noticed is how quickly my heart-rate began to drop on all these workouts and long runs. During FIRST training, my heart-rate was always up at 150 or higher, once I introduced more recovery days It generally stayed a little lower despite me running similar workouts. By the end of the year I was running my fastest ever 10K so while FIRST kickstarted that, it was other training which got me there.
Big Red Running 
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