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How Garmin developers got Galloway's 10k training plan wrong

3565978
over 3 years ago

I set up a 10k training plan selecting Jeff Galloway as coach.

It is 3 activities per week, and has a nice progression EXCEPT the running activity which translates back to english, from norwegian, as "An easy run".

The exercises are:

  • speed repetitions: repetitions of 800m that is quite hard. I'm currently doing x12 of them, and each repetition it high lvl4 pulse rate.
  • hills repetition: 15sec up and 15 sec down a hill. No sweat
  • running: this started with a mysterious 11.25km, then progressed to 14.48km, 17.7km 

I'm annoyed that these runs are translated to norwegian as "an easy run". These runs (after the hard speed repetition exercises) has caused my knees and heels to start aching. Pensive

Looking on mr. Galloway's own webpage I see that distances in Garmin's plan are crazy for a 10k plan: http://www.jeffgalloway.com/training/5k-10k-training/

Where I think I can blame the developers is in the unit conversion. I'm convinced Garmin use imperial units in their software (yey, go Liberia, Myanmar and USA). I bet mr. Galloway has put in the length of the runs in km, but the developers has interpret them as miles. Or perhaps more realistically: there is a formula given to the developers how to calculate the next length of the run, but they have mixed up the units or something badly.

  • 11.25km = 7 miles
  • 14.48km = 9 miles
  • 17.70km = 11miles

So are you as me, doing 2 exercises a week, running 4-10km per exercise, then I strongly suggest that you do not put the extra strain on you body following the runs in Garmin's "Galloway's10k plan". At least not until there is a update on the plan.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I think you are following the Ingebrigtsen plan by mistake Flag no. Seriously, this would not be the first time unit conversions have caused trouble. Unfortunately it looks as if other users were querying Coach Jeff's 10k plan two years ago and a year ago.

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I got a video today called "How to run faster", and got confirmed my suspicion: the distance of "Long Easy Run" is way too long and shouldn't be more that a bit longer than 10km.

    I haven't got to the extreme number of repetitions that this post think is extreme though: Jeff Galloway 10KM Training Plan - Excessive workouts ("not yet", that is)

  • 0 over 3 years ago

    I am 100% aligned with you. The plan makes no sense.

    The long run is way too long, and the speed repetitions (with magic miles into it) are really hard.

    Next you have hills repetition that even not tiring.

    Once again this is a Garmin bug in poor software management.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to 6360181

    I would bear in mind that almost all top runners from middle distance (800m and 1500m) upwards do pretty high mileage including runs up to at least 2 hours in length. This is because the long runs cause physiological adaptations that are useful for a shorter competitive distance.

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Can somebody from Garmin please confirm whether the mileage in the plan is correct?

    I've just started the plan and I'm a bit concerned that it may be incorrect.

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I've just given up on this plan 6 weeks in. The mileage has risen way too much week on week. The 800m repeats went from 4 to 8 rounds in two weeks

    This week I was supposed to do hill repeats which are about 25 minutes and 4km for me, which was fine. Then however it wanted ne to do speed repeats of 10x800m then 3min walking, which with the warm up, cadence, acceleration drills abd warm down would have been 13-14km. My third run was then going to be a long slow 15km.

    It just doesn't make sense given the mileage I've seen for any other 10km programs. I know you do some runs longer than the race distance but to be doing two 11km or longer runs a week from week 4 of a 12 week program seems excessive, even if some of it is walking!

    Annoyingly Garmin won't let me switch to another program as I'm 7 weeks from race day so I've found something online instead. Hopefully the other two programs are more sensible 

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to 6895671

    I am glad to hear this as misery loves company! Seriously I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to hunt this out this thread and find I am not alone in thinking this training plan is insane. As these speed and goal pace repeats have ramped up over the past few weeks (I am in week 6) and post the 10x800 yesterday, I have been convincing myself that this must taper at some point. But to my horror it seems it will culminate in 20 x 800 by which time I will no doubt have to drop out due to injury (already have the beginnings of plantar fascitis in one heel).

    Furthermore I sympathise with those who are struggling to fit in this training in their lives. To hear an ultramarathoner call this 10k program excessive says it all.  I was going to get up at 5 tomorrow for the 11 mile “long easy run” but I’m going to sleep an extra hour, quit the program and cut the distance in half! 

    Given the amount of posting on the topic of this 10k program I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that Garmin has not escalated this to Jeff Galloway and team to verify. There is no way he intended to sanction this. I did the 5k program which was completely reasonable and great to follow.  Hopefully someone proactive from Garmin will read this and earn their keep  

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I think I have the same issue. I start week 2 today, I need to do a magic mile + 4x800m repeats. My long run was on friday, only 4x800m repeats. So something is wrong here.
    Also noticed that when you do speed repeat, my forerunner is reporting 0.5mi and speed is in mi too! In other words I was expecting to run at 5.14/km and when I started the watch was reporting around 8 ! I checked watch configuration, but settings seems ok.

    I guess there are some conversion issue.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to 8526144

    I partially fixed my issue. Despite having the mobile app set to metric, and sync done, the forerunner 55 is still set to miles. I needed to change the settings directly on the watch to get rid of all the measure reported as miles.
    This seems a bug or something wrong !

    Yet I'm not sure my 10K plan is 10Km, I suspect this is 10miles. Next week I have an easy run on my plan, but this is 11,26 km (!). Math says that this could be 0.7 of 10K, i.e. 7km.

    Mr Garmin, please have a look at this, it seems someone directly took the plan without looking at what it is inside.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to 8526144

    I contacted Garmin and Galloway's team, without success :-( I think they don't want to look into this.

    Anyway I think there's a simple solution: 10K plan is 10miles

    So if you take this plan as a plan for 16Km (10 miles) everything should be right. I guess then that 5K is 8Km.
    And (half) marathon should not change.

    End of the story.