Lift and go long.

A gym session here is not “push day” as a caption. It is the work of keeping strength while the mileage climbs. A run is not a sticker on a map. It is pace, distance, what went wrong, how the legs felt after lifting, and what to improve next.

Two full marathons last year sit on that continuum. I am not publishing race titles or finish times until those details are logged properly. What is public is the practice: strength and endurance, together — and the papers that tell you where that practice gets expensive.

Interference is a dose problem

Hickson’s 1980 study is still the warning label. Three groups: strength, endurance, both. VO2 max rose in the endurance groups. Leg strength rose steadily in the strength-only group. The concurrent group tracked them for about seven weeks, then strength flattened and fell (Hickson, 1980). The protocol was high-frequency endurance stacked on a serious strength block. I treat that as a warning about dose, not as a reason to quit running.

Wilson’s 2012 meta-analysis of 21 studies put numbers on the trade. Mean effect sizes for hypertrophy: 1.23 strength-only, 0.85 concurrent, 0.27 endurance-only. For strength: 1.76, 1.44, 0.78. Power took the clearest hit. Running, but not cycling, was associated with decrements in hypertrophy and strength; more frequent and longer endurance sessions correlated with smaller lifting gains (Wilson, 2012).

Later reviews are less fatalistic and more specific. Schumann 2024: concurrent training can blunt lower-body strength and power, especially in trained men; endurance usually survives (Schumann, 2024). Fyfe 2014 and the later physiology review: AMPK versus mTOR is the classroom shorthand — residual fatigue and session order are the gym version (Fyfe, 2014; Fyfe, 2017). Barbell Medicine summed the practical line for beginners: concurrent work is how you meet health guidelines; the original Hickson hit looks a lot like too much load, too fast (Barbell Medicine, 2024).

How I think about a week

I try to give the week two clear signals, plus enough recovery that neither one is fake.

• Lift with intent. Compounds, progressive overload, enough hard sets that strength actually has something to adapt to. I don’t turn every session into a circuit because it feels hybrid. Circuits are a different stimulus.
• Run with a purpose. Easy aerobic volume builds the engine. A little high-intensity work raises the ceiling. Seiler’s work on intensity distribution is the reminder that most endurance kilometres should not be a fight (Seiler, 2010).
• Don’t stack the expensive days. If heavy squats and a hard interval session share an afternoon, that is a choice. When strength is the priority I lift first. Then I eat. Then I sleep.

Hawley and Lundby argue that power and endurance aren’t doomed opposites if the program respects energy systems, protein synthesis windows, and residual fatigue (Hawley, 2025). In a given block I pick one quality to push and I keep the other from disappearing. Marathon prep can let running lead. After the race, strength can lead. Hybrid is not 50/50 every week of your life. It’s refusing to abandon one side forever.

The week is also sleep and food

Recovery, nutrition, and showing up again are part of the same story. The 2021 BJSM sleep consensus is blunt: athletes often don’t get enough, and performance and illness risk move with it (Walsh, 2021). ISSN’s nutrition update is the unglamorous counterpart: energy availability, protein distributed across the day, carbohydrate around hard endurance (Kerksick, 2018). Performance is not a montage of padel smashes and gym mirrors. Those frames are real — they are on this site because they happened — but they are not a substitute for the days between them.

This is not a training plan and not medical advice. The photographs from the gym are evidence of the work, not a program to copy.