Good Vibes
& Exercise
Foundations · 5-week block · beginner–intermediate

Five efforts. Five weeks. One engine.

Every run you'll ever do lives somewhere on the intensity spectrum below. This block teaches you to feel all five — easy base, tempo, threshold, VO₂max, and the long session — while building fitness the fastest way the physiology allows: mostly easy, a little hard, and progressed on purpose.

Z1Recovery
Z2Aerobic base
Z3Tempo
Z4Threshold
Z5VO₂max
← burns fat, builds the engineburns sugar, sharpens the top end →

→ Enter your numbers

miles you comfortably run now
Minutes : seconds — a recent race is best
Estimates max HR (Tanaka)
Schedule preferences — optional
A group run or club night — we build around it
Tap any day you're never able to train — sessions schedule around them
Heart rate zones — optional
From a hard field test or lab. An estimate can be off by 10+ bpm, so a real number meaningfully sharpens every zone.

Your training zones

Paces are derived from your current 5K fitness using distance-equivalency and the effort-to-intensity relationships in Jack Daniels' running model. Heart rate is a slower-reacting signal than pace — on short intervals, trust pace and breathing; on easy and long runs, let HR be the ceiling that keeps you honest.

The 5-week block

3 build · 1 peak · 1 deload + retest

Days of the week are a suggestion — move sessions to fit your life, but keep at least one easy or rest day between two hard days. If a workout feels wrong (unusually heavy legs, elevated resting HR, poor sleep), swap it for an easy run. Consistency across five weeks beats any single heroic session.

Warm-up & dynamic drills

the "dynamic drills" your sessions call for

Standard warm-up

Before every run · ~5 min

Wake up the hips, glutes, and calves and prime the ankles before you run. Move through each smoothly and controlled — this is activation, not stretching.

  • Leg swings, front to back · 10–12 each leg
  • Leg swings, side to side · 10–12 each leg
  • Glute kickbacks · glute activation
  • Calf raises · calf activation
  • Pogos, 30–40 sec · steady, or alternating high–low

Dynamic drills

Before quality sessions · the full prep

When a workout calls for dynamic drills, do the standard warm-up above, then add these running drills — 15–20 m each — to sharpen coordination and turnover before the hard work:

  • A-skips
  • B-skips
  • C-skips
  • Quick high knees
  • Butt kicks
  • Straight-leg kicks · a.k.a. toy soldiers
  • Heel scoops

The five foundations

what each effort trains, and why

Aerobic base

Zone 2 · easy · the largest slice

Easy running is the engine room. At this intensity your body builds more capillaries and more mitochondria — the tiny power plants inside muscle cells — and gets better at burning fat for fuel. It's low-stress, so you can do a lot of it, and volume is what drives most of your aerobic gains.

The classic mistake is running easy days too hard. If it feels moderate, it's too fast.

Feels like: fully conversational, nose-breathing possible, could go much longer.

Tempo

Zone 3 · comfortably moderate

Tempo sits between easy and threshold — sustained, controlled, "comfortably hard's calmer cousin." It teaches pacing discipline and extends how long you can hold a strong aerobic effort without tipping into heavy fatigue.

Used as continuous blocks, it bridges your easy base to the sharper threshold work that follows.

Feels like: you can speak in short sentences, breathing is deeper but rhythmic.

Threshold

Zone 4 · lactate threshold (LT2)

Threshold is the pace you could hold for roughly an hour all-out — the tipping point where lactate starts to accumulate faster than you can clear it. Training right at this line raises it, so every other pace becomes more sustainable. It's the single highest-return workout for most distance runners.

We build it with "cruise intervals" — repeated blocks with short jogs — so you accumulate time at the intensity without the session falling apart.

Feels like: comfortably hard, a few words at a time, controlled but working.

VO₂max

Zone 5 · maximal aerobic power

VO₂max is the ceiling on how much oxygen your body can use per minute — the size of your aerobic engine. You train it with hard intervals of 2–5 minutes that pull you up near that ceiling and hold you there, prompting the heart and muscles to adapt.

It's potent but costly, so it stays a small fraction of the week and arrives only after a base is laid.

Feels like: hard, breathing heavy, no talking — but repeatable with recovery.

The long session

Zone 2 · extended · run, ride, or cross-train

The long session is aerobic base with the duration turned up. Time on feet — or on the bike, or any steady cardio — deepens fatigue resistance, improves fuel economy, and strengthens the connective tissue that keeps you healthy. Because it's easy effort, a bike or elliptical builds nearly the same aerobic return with far less pounding, which is why the long day can be cross-modal.

Feels like: easy and steady from start to finish; finish feeling you could keep going.

Warm-up, strides & recovery

the connective tissue of every week

Quality sessions open with easy jogging and a few drills so the hard part starts on prepared legs. Strides — short, relaxed accelerations with full rest — teach smooth, fast turnover without real fatigue cost. Recovery days and rest aren't the absence of training; they're when the adaptations you triggered actually get built.

Feels like: strides are fast but relaxed, never a sprint; recovery runs are gentle.
The principle underneath it all

Polarized training: mostly easy, occasionally hard

~80% EASY~20% HARD

Decades of research on endurance athletes — most associated with physiologist Stephen Seiler — converge on the same pattern: the athletes who improve fastest and most durably spend the large majority of their training easy and reserve a small, deliberate portion for genuinely hard work. The danger zone is the moderate "grey" middle done every day: too hard to recover from, too easy to drive top-end change.

This block is built to that ratio. The easy and long runs are the 80. The threshold and VO₂max sessions are the 20. Progression is layered on gradually — volume rises by single-digit percentages each week, hard work is introduced only after a base is set, and the fifth week pulls back so your body can absorb the work and show what it built on the retest.