How long should it take to sensibly reach 100-miles per week if you have been running about 20-miles per week for a few months?
Thanks in advance.
How long should it take to sensibly reach 100-miles per week if you have been running about 20-miles per week for a few months?
Thanks in advance.
Sensibly you're looking at years. If you are only running 20 miles a week you are probably new to running and do not have a strong enough base. Keep building and you'll get there though. Of course there are always some natural runners or durable people out there that are able to jump to that level right away but I don't recommend it. There are a lot of fitness gains and adaptations to be made a long the way.
If a person wants to get up to 100mpw, I would first start out just trying to slowly increase mileage to 50 or 60 and not really even think about 100mpw. Spend a few months building up to 50 or 60 and then stay there for a few months. Then start slowly building up to 70 or 80. Stay there for a few months. etc. It should indeed take years to build up to 100mpw.
Thank you very much.
By far the most important thing is not to back track. This doesn't mean every week is longer than the one before it, but it does mean that you can't be getting into and out of serious training all the time, or you'll never make any progress.
It's reasonable to jump 20 miles/week over the course of a year, at least until you get up around 80. At that point, it tends to become more individual. Some people can go from 80s to 100s or 110s with no trouble at all. Others might take years to get from 80 to 100.
Keep in mind that you need to be actually absorbing the training. The point isn't to shuffle dead legs through 100 miles. It's to get to where you can do 100 miles while still hammering a couple of workouts and not feeling dead-legged all the time.
Usually when you first push to a new mileage total, you're not going to have a great week of training. But pushing that total up gives you "headroom" for the slightly lower mileage weeks, when you want to really nail workouts. And as you continue to progress, mileage levels that were once a stretch become easy.