Summer Mileage and Performance

CoachB

RE: Summer Mileage and Performance 7/29/2012 10:23AM - in reply to an xc coach

I've had kids bump up mileage from one summer to the next to find that they run the same dang times as they did the year before.

A perfect example is a guy that, going into his junior year ran maybe 25mpw average. That season he was about a 17:45 guy for us in cross. The next year, he spent a number of his summer weeks in the 70mpw range, probably averaging 50-55 mpw for the entire summer. That fall he ran 17:41.

Why did his huge jump in training volume fail to help his running?

1. He did almost all of his mileage at a sloooow pace, often running with the girls or slower runners on the team to help motivate them. The running with the slower kids was great, but he needed to spend some miles at an appropriate training pace for himself. He would go run with a couple of the girls in the morning to get in some miles, then come back and run with some of the slower boys in the evening for some more miles. He stacked up some pretty good totals that summer, but did hardly any of those miles at a pace fast enough to stimulate training adaptations. If he would have just maintained his 20-25 mpw of decent paced running, THEN added on all of the slow stuff, he probably would have been better off. He would have been better off still, if he would have just gone to 35-40 mpw of appropriately paced training.

2. He got injured early in the season (IT band)and it took him a long time to get back to a decent level of training. He was faster than he had been in his junior year during our first pre-season time trial. He was marginally faster than his junior year in our second pre- season time trial. He ran about the same time as his junior year in our league opener. At our home invitational, he ended up slower than the previous year. After that, his IT started acting up and he missed much of the rest of the season. At our section meet, he ran the exact same time as a senior that he did as a junior. My hypothesis is that so much of his running was done at a slow pace that his mechanics were altered, which then led to the IT problem when we started doing more faster stuff.

I've seen the same scenario played out a few times on my team. I've currently got a group of sophomore boys that are exceeding, by a fair amount, their recomended mileage levels. They are doing so by running much of it at a slow pace (sometimes as slow as 10 min per mile). We did a 5 mile race on July 4th (after a month of running), and their times were really disappointing.

Mileage is great, but there has to be a purpose to it. If you quadruple your mileage, but cut your running speed dramatically, I don't think you will see any benefit at all.

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