When Aaron Olson talks a bit about prioritization of workouts in his 'less-is-more' take on running training. He prescribes three efforts as well, a speed effort, a tempo effort and a longer effort. Like me, he favors quality over quantity and recommends cutting out the longer effort first if you're not feeling recovered.

For many this may seem counter-intuitive, given that the assumed goal here is a longer run. But the truth about HIT is that the payoffs of going faster will always help you go longer, but the reverse isn't true as well. HIT is, simply put, the most efficient way to train in terms of fitness gains per time invested. But to do HIT well--to maximize that efficiency, it is very very important to go into each Baseline Workout (BW) feeling fresh. After all you're goal is to meet or beat the previous attempt at the same workout--things are going to ratchet up pretty quickly and if you have a good day one session then that will be nearly impossible to match or exceed the next time around if you're not completely recovered.

This might mean that you need to skip the longer efforts prescribed here entirely or that you need to make them essentially recovery runs. Eventually you will want to push harder on the longer efforts (at least once or twice) just for mental confidence and this might mean failing at the BW the following week, but this should certainly NOT be the weekly norm. Quality vs. quantity!

And it might not need to be said, but you should also leave at least a day of full rest between BW efforts. Even though once you get used to a twice a week diet of intense ~10 min efforts you will feel like you recover very quickly, your body will still need time to make those adaptations as part of the 'super-compensation' principle, so give it at least 24 hours.