The 80/20 Norwegian plans are good, but they’re very different from the base plans in some important ways. Most importantly: they are lower volume and less overall intensity than the “regular” plans of the same “level” in the 80/20 system. That might be just what you’re looking for. It also might not get you quite as far as you hoped — it didn’t for me! That doesn’t make them bad plans. In the rest of this post, I’ll try to flesh out how they’re different, though, and therefore whether you might want to use them or skip them.

The gist of the Norwegian-style method is to mix a high volume of very easy effort with a high volume of sub-lactate threshold efforts. The folks who have had most success have done “Norwegian doubles”: days with both a morning and an afternoon workout-type effort, staying below lactate threshold with both, several days a week. The actual Norwegian athletes doing this are using lactate blood level measurements with finger pricks throughout their intervals. The in-between days build supporting volume safely with the very low effort work.

In other words, the Norwegian method is a variant on classic “polarized” training: lots of low-intensity “foundation” work, lots of relatively high-intensity work, very little in between. The main difference is that the relatively high-intensity work is capped at lactate threshold. The goal of that cap is that it allows a much higher volume of work there, because the workouts do not tax the body as much.

Many of the workouts in the 80/20 Endurance Norwegian plans are explicitly modeled on the workouts the Norwegians are doing, and the non-workout days are all in Zone 1 vs. 80/20’s normal Zone 2 days. However, the plans also have a few notable differences from “true” Norwegian-style training:

1. Naturally, they do not require blood lactate level measurements. Indeed, while the plans give some guidance about how to use lactate meters, none of the workouts are framed in terms of lactate levels at all. They use the standard options of heart rate, pace, or power instead. I say “naturally” because most athletes, me included, simply are not up for pricking their fingers constantly during runs.

2. The Level 3 plan includes doubles days, but not Norwegian-style doubles. As with other Level 3 plans from 80/20, the second workout on days with doubles is a recovery run, not another threshold workout.

3. The plans include a mix of other “standard” 80/20 workouts that you will recognize from their other plans. Many of these will certainly go past lactate threshold.

In sum, it’s fair to describe these as Norwegian-influenced or -inspired variants on the normal 80/20 plans, rather than totally new plans that fully lean into the Norwegian method. That isn’t a criticism per se, but you should be clear that that’s what you’re getting.

They also have some other little quirks compared to the “regular” plans. The doubles days on a Level 3 Norwegian plan, for example, top out at 35 minutes instead of 40. Likewise, the Level 3 Norwegian plans have no mid-week longer run: they top out at 60 minutes with 6 minutes of strides, vs. the normal plans’ 75 minutes. Even the workouts tend to be a bit shorter in terms of total time.¹

These factors combined mean that in practice the Level 3 Norwegian plan will give you not only less time on feet but also less mileage from that time. All other things being equal, more volume will give you better results, so this matters. Now, all other things are never equal, and recall that the goal of controlling intensity and keeping the easy days down in Zone 1 is to let you stay healthier and more able to go do the work well. I am certainly on board with the goal! However, I’m not sure the plans are tuned quite right for that outcome, in part because of those other quirks.

The net is that the Level 3 Norwegian plans end up being something like a Level 3 in terms of effort and intensity, but a Level 2.5 in terms of volume. I found this a bit ironic. In principle, the approach should allow you to stack more volume. At a bare minimum, you should be able to do the same amount of time, if a bit lower mileage, with less risk of injury or burnout than on the regular plans.

My body responded noticeably less effectively to the Norwegian plan than it has to either the other 80/20 plans I have done or the 80/20-style training I did with my coach, Steph Christensen, in my spring build to Boston.² I chalk up the lesser effectiveness primarily to two things:

• Lower volume
• Less time in Zone 2

Running in Zone 1 instead of Zone 2 on the foundation/easy days and cutting off 45 minutes of programmed run time at the peak of the build amounted to at least 8 fewer miles per week than the regular 80/20 plan. I ran 100 – 150 fewer miles over the course of this build than I would have using one of the “regular” plans. That’s a lot less mileage!³

Late in the season, I also realized that the Zone 1 work simply wasn’t building my fitness as effectively as Zone 2 work has. Given that I have tolerated that Zone 2 work extremely well while running higher volume, I concluded that I needed to either significantly bump up the volume of the “load”/workout days or bump up from Zone 1 to Zone 2 on the foundation/easy days. I opted for the latter: for the last 4 weeks of the build, I started adding in more Zone 2 work again. I immediately started seeing the fitness response I expected on the other runs in the week, especially my long runs.

Now, this definitely doesn’t discredit the Zone 1 work I had done. It had generated lots of underlying aerobic fitness, and I had not gotten hurt or burnt out. It does, however, confirm something I learned a few years ago: my body really does better with Zone 2 work for foundation stimulus than Zone 1.⁴ The Norwegians using this method might just be different from me on that front. By the same token, this is just my experience with these plans. Your body is different from mine and works differently in turn.

Still, I do think that combining lower volume with lower intensity will hit a lot of people similarly to how it hit me. If I were writing a new version of these plans, I would make sure the workout sessions were at least equal in duration and load to those on the main plan, and I would likewise increase the duration of the easy days so the total volume stacked up similarly. That would make the total weekly duration higher, but again: that’s the whole point!

I would also be interested to see an 80/20 plan that actually embraces the Norwegian Doubles approach. It might not be for most athletes, but I came out of the Norwegian-style interval days feeling like I absolutely could do double workouts, not just a recovery run for the double, and I kind of wanted to. In a future build, I just might!

Net: I am glad these are in 80/20’s catalog, and I really liked some aspects of the plan I used, but not without qualification. The Norwegian-style sessions with short, hard intervals and long recoveries were a particularly nice change of pace and I expect to incorporate variations on them into future training blocks. All the same, I was a bit disappointed in how the plan worked for me, even with my modifications. I will be curious to see whether, and how, the 80/20 Endurance folks revise these plans in the years to come. More volume, and maybe some true doubles? I’d love to see it.

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Notes

1. Additionally, there are no RPE-based versions of this. This makes sense: pace, power, and HR all give you ways to at least approximate lactate threshold. Perceived effort simply does not. ↩︎

2. Given my interest in the Norwegian style, Steph and I integrated some of the Norwegian plan’s workouts along the way, but it was definitely not following any exact plan. That flexibility was exactly what I needed in recovering from a bad back injury last October. ↩︎

3. And that was with my making some changes to bump up volume at key points in the plan. At the start of the season, I updated the long runs to extend them a fair bit past what the plan does as a baseline. I did the same with the regular Marathon Level 3 plan back in spring 2025 for my first marathon, to good effect, and it worked well again here. ↩︎

4. I figured this out by seeing a huge improvement in a very short time by switching from Phil Maffetone’s HR guidance to running in my actual Zone 2 via a lactate threshold test. Prior to that, I had been accidentally doing all my running in Zone 1, because that’s where the Maffetone HR formula put me. Don’t use formulas. Do a lactate threshold test (even if that’s just a race). ↩︎