One runner
at a time.
VO2max Cluj is a training project, not a club and not an app. It exists to teach one person how to train properly, in enough detail that they never need to ask what to do next.
Most people who start running never get a second gear. They run the same route at the same medium effort, three times a week, for years, and then decide they are not built for it.
They are. The missing piece is almost never willpower or talent — it is that nobody ever told them which run should be hard and which should be easy, and how far apart the two need to be. That is the entire content of this site.
The method is not original and does not pretend to be. Eighty per cent of your weekly volume sits at an effort where you could hold a conversation. The other twenty is genuinely hard. It has been the backbone of distance training for decades, and it works for a first-time runner exactly as well as it works for someone chasing a personal best.
What is specific here is the detail. Every session is drawn to scale, every pace is a range rather than a number, and every route is traced on the real path network and measured off that trace. The examples come from Cluj-Napoca because that is where this was written — but a loop you can measure exists in every city on earth.
What this is, and is not.
A training method
Structured, progressive, and specific enough that you always know what the next run is and how hard it should feel.
A running club
There are excellent communities in Cluj already doing group runs. This project deliberately does something else: teaching one person to train alone, properly.
Free to start
The plan builder, every session and every route cost nothing and need no account.
A promise of times
Nobody can tell you how much faster you will get. What the block guarantees is a structure — the result depends on you turning up for eight weeks.
A runner who
runs the same
streets as you.
Maxim Cazacu: one person, coaching a small number of athletes and writing everything on this site. No content team, no affiliate links, no supplements. If something here is wrong, there is exactly one person to tell.
Start with the free plan →Common questions.
No. Every session can be run on a measured loop with a phone timer — that is exactly why the routes here have known distances. A watch makes it easier to review afterwards, not easier to run.
Start with
week one.
Seven questions, an eight-week plan, no account. If it turns out not to suit you, you have lost two minutes.
Build my plan →