80/20 training plan gripe

 Shipped more money to Matt Fitzgerald for reasons I can't explain, but anyway...  Noting here for myself his notation.  For some reason, he uses the numbering system like "fast finish run 4" in his plans, so you have to go back and decode what this mean when he could have said 5' Z1/25' Z2/10' Z3.  Not even more characters or even just use color codes:  5/25/10.  These match the garmin colors.

Of course doing this, you could probably fit the book into two pages...

So much flipping back and forth to figure out what the intensity and volume of the plans is.  Eg. for level 3 marathon first week is

• Mon.  FR6 or XT
• Tue.  AM FF6.  PM FR3 or XT.
• Wed. FR6 or XT
• Thu.  FR6 or XT
• Fri.  SP 6
• Sat.  FR6 or XT.
• Sun.  LR 6

What the hell?

FR 6 = 5' Z1/35' Z2/5' Z1.  Generally all foundation runs start and end in 5' Z1 with the middle in Z2, so this is 45' easy with 5' wup/cdn.  The FR X runs go in 5' increments with X, starting with FR 1 = 20' easy.  So.... FR X = (X-1)*5 + 20 easy.  FR6 = (6-1)*5 + 20 = 45.

We get to do math to decode this!

• Mon.  45' easy or XT.
• Tue. 45' easy am.  30' easy pm.
• Wed.  45' easy or XT.
• Thu.  45' easy or XT.
• Fri.  fartlek.  38' including 6 x (1' hard, 2' recovery)
• Sat.  45' easy or XT.
• Sun.  long run.  1 mile wup.  9.5 miles easy. 0.5-mile cdn

Very reasonable, but decoding that was exhausting. Does he deliberately obfuscate the plan to get you to buy his plans from training peaks?