Marius
Bakken.

Who is Marius Bakken

Bakken's career ran from 800 m to 10,000 m, but the 5,000 m was his event. He competed for IL Runar, ran at the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games, finished ninth at the 2001 World Championships and twelfth in 2005, and won Norwegian titles over 1500 m (2001, 2003, 2004) and 5,000 m (2003, 2005).

Part of his running education happened in the United States. As an exchange student at York High School in Elmhurst, Illinois, he trained under coach Joe Newton and won both the 1600 m and 3200 m at the 1996 Illinois state championships. The next year he ran at Indiana University under Sam Bell.

After the 2006 European Championships he stepped back to focus on medicine, and he qualified as a physician in 2010. Today he works as a doctor and writes about training on his own site, mariusbakken.com.

Personal bests

Distance	Time	Year
1500 m	3:38.84	2005
3000 m	7:40.77	2001
5000 m	13:06.39	2004
10,000 m	28:26.36	2000

How the Norwegian method started

The method did not start as a theory. It started with a runner who had stopped improving. By Bakken's own account, his results stalled between 1996 and 1998 while he trained like a middle-distance runner, with a lot of hard work and not enough control.

In 1998 the Norwegian athletics federation and Olympiatoppen ran a lactate monitoring project, and Bakken started measuring his blood lactate in training. What he found changed his training. The textbook threshold was 4 mmol/L. His own threshold sat closer to 3. So he moved his working target below 3, usually between 2.3 and 3.0 mmol/L, and ran his threshold sessions under control instead of at the edge.

From 1999 he split his threshold work into two sessions on the same day, usually twice a week. In 2000 he travelled to Kenya for the first time and started lactate testing Kenyan runners, and found that some world-class Kenyans had thresholds as low as 2 mmol/L. Over the following years he ran more than 5,500 lactate tests, and by the winter of 2004 the whole system was in place. That summer he ran 13:06.

What the method is

The Norwegian method is a way of organising training around a lot of controlled threshold work. In its elite form it looks like this:

• Double threshold days. Two threshold sessions on the same day, morning and evening, usually twice a week. How a double threshold day works.
• Lactate as the speed limit. Pace is set by measured lactate, not by feel or by a target time.
• Easy days that are really easy. The volume around the threshold days is slow on purpose, so the next quality day is possible.
• One faster session. One session a week above threshold, often short hills, which Bakken calls the X element.
• Load over time. Bakken argues that the muscles, not the heart and lungs, are what usually limits how much a runner can absorb, so the whole system is built to manage load across weeks.

Bakken himself ran about 180 km a week in this system. That is the elite version. For most runners, the same principles in a smaller dose is what works, and that is where Norwegian Singles comes in: one sub-threshold session a day, around three times a week, no lactate meter needed.

Bakken and the Ingebrigtsens

The method became famous through other runners. By Bakken's own account he advised the father and coach of the Ingebrigtsen brothers from 2009, more closely between 2011 and 2013, and he names Jakob Ingebrigtsen as the clearest high-profile example of the approach. In 2023 he co-authored a scientific review of threshold training in world-class distance runners with Arturo Casado, Carl Foster and Leif Inge Tjelta, which describes three to four lactate-guided threshold sessions a week as a common pattern at the top.

Marius Bakken's book

In March 2026 Bakken published The Norwegian Method Applied, a 328-page book that pulls two decades of his writing into one system, with a foreword by Steve Magness. A Norwegian edition, Løping!, came first. The book covers threshold training, the Golden Zone, double threshold, recovery and injury signs from a doctor's perspective, and plans for runners from 5K to the marathon.

Sources: Marius Bakken, The Norwegian Model and Double Threshold Training, mariusbakken.com. Career data from Wikipedia and World Athletics. Book details from the publisher listing and Athletics Weekly's review (April 2026).