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In my opinion Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas gives more, better guidance which helped me to break 3 hours. This book really did not provide the guidance that I was looking for. I bought this book in preparation for my 50th marathon. I was looking for information that would improve my training in comparison with my previous 49 marathons.
For plodders like me, it has value in understanding more of why we are plodders and how we can choose to change this. I recommend this book to competitive runners and elite athletes. "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 neither, but like all runners am interested in running faster. This means adapting the schedule to the way your body responds each week, each day, even each run if need be. Brad Hudson is an experienced coach, working mostly with elite athletes and competitive runners as far as I can tell.
The book helped me clarify my own approach to running schedules, which I term "flexibility". By adapting his aggressive schedules to our own needs we can maximize the benefits of our training. 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.
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.
The FIRST program -- "Run Less/Run Faster" is a more beneficial book to me. 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. This book is good if you are a fairly serious runner. I am a novice runner who wants faster times at the half marathon and 10K.
I recommend this book to any runner looking for a fresh and new approach to their training. '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 couldn't put it down. 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.
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. This book in my opinion conveys what I've been looking for all over the internet, blogs, forums. In all a wonderful training book that can open your mind to lot of useful new information and change your training forever. 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. 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. 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.
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