On the first Sunday of June, @cichykot lined up for the Port Sunlight 10km and ran 43:56. Not a solo time trial: a real race, 4:23 per kilometre at an intensity factor of 1.02, paced as ten one-kilometre blocks with his heart rate parked at an average of 169. Nearly three months later he is six weeks out from his next goal race, and the way he is building toward it is one of the most disciplined sub-threshold projects in our data.
Open his calendar and you will not find hero intervals. You will find the same three sessions rotating week after week: 5x6min SUB LT, 10x3 min SUB LT, 3x10min SUB LT, every rep at 92 to 102 percent of threshold pace with one-minute floats, separated by forty-minute recovery runs. Nothing above threshold except race day. Runners online have started calling this style the Norwegian singles approach. He does not call it anything. He writes the sessions himself, names them in Polish, and shows up for the next one.
The test he outran
He checks the engine roughly once a month with a ramp test: a staircase of two-minute pace steps, each faster than the last, run in his TymeWear vest. He ran one on June 23, one on July 5, and one on August 1. The August test is the moment I would pick from his whole summer, because the protocol ran out before he did. It needed an extra step at 3:30 to 3:40 per kilometre added on top, for the simple reason that the July version ended at a pace he could now run through.
That vest is the second layer of the story. TymeWear measures breathing rate, and his recent sessions carry ventilation targets in their tags: VE106, VE121. Where most runners pace by heart rate or feel, he is increasingly pacing by breath, which is about as close as an amateur can get to training by lab thresholds without living in a lab.
The shape of the build
The discipline shows at the top of the plan too. After the June 10k he gave himself a genuine recovery week, marked in his calendar as Tydzień regeneracyjny, then a five-day full break in mid-July. On July 24 he opened a fresh season block pointed at October 11, and the next three weeks step up 272, 286, 300 in weekly load. Polarized model, three quality days, no filler.
Here is what that looks like in his Training Score:
| Week | Total | Overload |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-14 | 83 | 100 |
| 2026-07-12 | 75 | 100 |
| 2026-07-26 | 55 | 72 |
| 2026-08-09 | 64 | 100 |
The June peak carried him into the 10k. The dip at the end of July is the break, and the score reported it as exactly that. Since the new block opened, Overload is pinned at 100 again: the stimulus is back on, right on schedule.
Six weeks is the frame for what comes next. The goal race is October 11. Between now and then the plan is more of the same, slightly faster: the same three sub-threshold sessions, the same floats, the monthly test. If August is any indication, the ramp protocol will need another step before he is done.
You can follow him at intervalcoach.app/p/cichykot. If you want to see what your own build looks like in the data, your Analytics page has the same charts. And if you would like your training featured in a future spotlight, set your profile to public and drop me a line.