Villanova coaching legend Jumbo Elliott, mentor of numerous sub 4:00 milers, had a training philosophy, which he coined KISS, an acronym for Keep It Simple Stupid. Athletes, such as Olympian Marty Liquori (pictured on the left) ran the same workouts week after week. Nothing fancy, just a steady diet of 400s and 200s with a lot of steady distance running on the non-interval days. Famous Australian marathoners, Robert DeCastella and Steve Moneghetti, also adopted a similar philosophy. While they obviously trained somewhat differently to the middle distance specialist Liquori, they too trained similarly week after week, in what has been coined complex training.
I've been trying to simplify things myself. One can find a staggering amount of training information on the internet these days, including a million and one different training programs for all events. Most road racers are full time workers with a lot of life responsibilities. It's not always practical to have a fancy training program with multiple phases when you're just training for a dozen local races every year. What seems to work for me is a weekly mix of three key workouts: a long easy to moderately paced run; a threshold workout in the 10K-10 mile race pace zone; and something faster like hill repeats or shorter intervals.
