The first sentence should read,
*they are not genetic freaks as far as reaching most of their potential off of just mileage at a good clip
The first sentence should read,
*they are not genetic freaks as far as reaching most of their potential off of just mileage at a good clip
Bump
Rez does have a point.
The examples used, Nenow and Clarke were famous for no 'traditional' workouts (no gut-busting track sessions) but they were also famous for not doing a lot of a jogging. The original question was how close can you get to your potential on 'easy' mileage. I don't think Nenow and Clarke were running particularly easy. They tapped into a happy medium of strong, steady running almost daily. The great fallacy of Lydiard's work is that his '100mpw base phase' was just easy jogging. Far from it! It was at a 'strong aerobic pace'. Killing yourself? Definitely not but also not slow by any means. They supplemented the 100mpw with easy jogging but the majority of their work was strong running.
If Clarke and Nenow had spent their days jogging around at 8:00 pace their results would have been very different.
Good discussion.
Pretzel Man wrote:
Very interesting topic. So if someone runs 8 miles a day at 8:30 pace for one year, what could they race the 5k in all out ??
This is not the way it works. If someone ran 8 miles a day at certain easy-ish heart rate every day the pace would gradually get faster at that heart rate because of aerobic development. (I would say this is the principal behind most distance training which is expected to last more than one season.)