Why high mileage? wrote:
I often see here advises to people who want to run faster a 10k or a 5k to increase their mileage. My question is what is the reason that more miles of easy to moderate pace running would be beneficial for faster 5-10k times?
Why not increase your intervals reps, increase your tempo miles, increase your fartleck miles? Why is it always increase your garbage miles? Why would running more garbage miles would better than running more miles at faster paces?
If the choice was do 30 more miles a week at sub 5 min pace or do 30 more miles a week at 8 min pace, and recover equally either way, everyone would pick the faster pace. Here is an experiment for you: run 100 miles a week a year with 20 per week fast - intervals, tempos, progressive runs past marathon pace, other workouts. Then run 50 mpw with 30 mpw fast. You're almost guaranteed to see better results with more mileage, but fewer faster! There are some people with uncommon genes that would make the 2nd approach better for them, and some who might benefit from doing 100 mpw with even less fast, etc. but this is not the average runner.
Any who, garbage miles are a myth. The only garbage miles are those too slow to take you to an aerobic state (like if you jogged along side your grandma) or too fast for you to recover from - like if you thought running 50 mpw fast would lead you to better results.
I'm guessing I'm not going to convince you of anything since you are so sure that slow miles, are garbage, even though you can look through over a decade of training threads and see how elites ran and performed well with plenty of slow mileage. For instance geb ran well at the 5 and 10k with 165 mpw and noted that his training was maybe only a little more than average ethiopian runners. Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter were doing upwards of 120 mpw, etc. Who knows, maybe you'll be a great middle distance runner with your approach, some certainly do train like that, but for any given runner, they'll be better with a high mileage approach.
The real trick is to get your mileage up to a reasonable amount, no less than 100 mpw, then increase the pace of your workouts. Its almost always better to drop a few secs per lap on 10-12x1000 than to work up to 15-20x1000 (though that workout has its place in half/marathon training when done at the right paces). Your ultimate goal is to cover a relatively short distance (even the marathon is relatively short compared to what a human could do) in the fastest time possible.