How Josh Sambrook Cut His Marathon From 3:24 to 2:28 With a System That Breaks Every Rule in Running
THE RUNNING EFFECT PODCAST
Dominic Schlueter
4.9 • 822 Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
TWO WEEKS OF FREE WITH CODE "RUNEFFECT" : https://kaizen.app.link/TRE
Most training apps tell you exactly what to do every day. Josh Sambrook helped to build one that tells you your weekly target, and lets you train however your life demands.
It’s the system that helped him run 120-mile weeks, cut his marathon time to 2:28 by age 23 (he ran his first marathon at 17), and reinvent how thousands of runners train.
Josh and Michael Keskerides are the co-founders of the Kaizen app for runners. The app is a flexible and dynamic training system that sets a training load target at the start of the week, and then the user is free to achieve this goal through whatever combination of runs works best for their lifestyle.
With the app and this training system, athletes can “trade” intensity for distance. Kaizen is the Japanese business principle of continuous improvement; discrete, ongoing, small changes can lead to significant benefits, and they used this as their model.
The two co-founders host the Miles Better Podcast, where they discuss running and how they use the app for training.
Josh himself is a sports scientist, builder of training systems and prediction engines, a running coach, writer, and podcaster–and he’s here to bring clarity to a sport drowning in noise.
Tap into the Josh Sambrook Special.
If you enjoy the podcast, please consider following us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and giving us a five-star review! I would also appreciate it if you share it with your friend who you think will benefit from it.
Comment the word “PODCAST” below and I’ll DM you a link to listen.
If this episode blesses you, please share it with a friend!
S H O W N O T E S
-The Run Down By The Running Effect (our new newsletter!): https://tinyurl.com/mr36s9rs
-Our Website: https://therunningeffect.run
-THE PODCAST ON YOUTUBE:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClLcLIDAqmJBTHeyWJx_wFQ
-My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therunningeffect/?hl=en
-Take our podcast survey: https://tinyurl.com/3ua62ffz
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Consistency, I mean, it's really the only thing that matters, right? |
| 0:02.4 | It was the thing that was missing and then and then found. |
| 0:06.5 | It is the singular most important thing, right? |
| 0:09.9 | Consistency is absolutely the thing that the elites have down so well |
| 0:14.4 | and amateur athletes often struggle with because we all have real lives |
| 0:19.3 | that we have to fit our training around and that might |
| 0:21.4 | involve moving house, getting a new job, going on holiday, which break up that consistency and make |
| 0:27.3 | it so much harder to progress steadily. Whereas I know certainly for me and I see it in all these |
| 0:34.6 | other people, my colleagues and friends and the people who I've |
| 0:40.1 | coached and have used the app. |
| 0:41.7 | So all of these different people, the most successful ones, are the most consistent in their |
| 0:45.8 | training for sure. |
| 0:49.3 | Ladies and gentlemen, that is Josh Sambrook today on the Running Effect podcast. |
| 0:53.4 | And today's conversation |
| 0:54.4 | was absolutely fascinating. I speak with Josh, who went from running 320s in the marathon to |
| 1:01.5 | 228. And he did it all, in my opinion, using the most unorthodox training method that |
| 1:07.3 | I've never heard anyone on this podcast use. And so today's conversation was really |
| 1:12.0 | interesting back and forth around the subject of training. And more specifically, for the people |
| 1:17.1 | out there who have busy lives, have families, have jobs, running can't be their top priority. |
| 1:22.3 | And that was the case for Josh, how to maximize the time that you spend in training |
| 1:26.3 | for the fastest result as possible |
| 1:28.8 | on race day. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dominic Schlueter, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Dominic Schlueter and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.