You didn’t give your age or your background.
An older runner won’t recover as quickly as a youngster, so the build up has to be slower.
Even if you are a youngster, if you did not do a lot of sport when you were young, your connective tissue may not be as strong (and injury resilient) as someone who did.
Another consideration is time. Try to build your running up by time instead of mileage. Most runners would struggle to run more, than say 10 hours per week. If you build up to 10 hours per week, and see what mileage that equates to. To increase above that, you have to hold the time, but increase the pace.
My weekly mileage beginning from February 5-11 to this past week are as follows:
3.45
10.38
27.91
27.32
26.05
38.32
52.40
28.63
71.81
75.72
(at 20.6 as of Tuesday for this week)
I started running 10 miles a day a couple weeks back as a sort of challenge. My friend gave me a heart rate monitor recently and I’ve been training with it. I’ve tried my best to remain within zone 2 for most of my runs. I tend to ignore it on group runs and just run with the pack but when I’m solo, I’m running pretty slowly. Around 9:30/mile as of this week. But like many have said, running this slowly has allowed me to run many more miles. I’m pretty content with 70 miles a week at this point. I’d like to remain consistent with it for a while before adding much more. I haven’t had a single run where I thought that I’d have to stop. I had two very unpleasant runs the first week where the temperature had spiked from previous days in the 50’s to 80° but ever since then everything has went relatively smoothly. No aches, no pains. Pretty surprised I’m holding up and I’m grateful to be.
“Only goal”?
secondary goal should be recovering.
tertiary goal should be avoiding fentanyl.
Quaternary goal should be ensuring that the earth does not spiral into the sun.
I’ll do you the service of acknowledging that you might consider these other goals to be truly subordinated to the goal you mention, and of assuming that you don’t want me to continue.
Alfie wrote:
You didn’t give your age or your background.
An older runner won’t recover as quickly as a youngster, so the build up has to be slower.
Even if you are a youngster, if you did not do a lot of sport when you were young, your connective tissue may not be as strong (and injury resilient) as someone who did.
30, and I'm as athletic as one can be without actually being described as athletic. I put enough tag/monkey bars in as a kid to be in the "injury resilient" category.
I played tennis in high school so lots of impact on my shins, I deadass have 99% bone density for 18 - 30 year olds (dexa scan verified), and I can touch the rim as a 5'10 guy.
3 years ago I tried running 3 miles everyday and was fine doing till I hurt my foot doing something else. It may be toxic masculinity but I'm optimistic I can hit like, the 70th percentile of the concensus range.
Is the 10 hour per week rule a logistics thing? Or a physical limit for non-elites?
Bro what the crap lol. Were you previously a runner that had taken a break? Or was 3.45 your first real week
Parsing wrote:
“Only goal”?
secondary goal should be recovering.
tertiary goal should be avoiding fentanyl.
Quaternary goal should be ensuring that the earth does not spiral into the sun.
I’ll do you the service of acknowledging that you might consider these other goals to be truly subordinated to the goal you mention, and of assuming that you don’t want me to continue.
Honestly I'm lacking a bit of direction in life so if you could list the top 100 goals for me I would value that.
Pentanary goal is learning what the right word is after quaternary
6ary goal is drinking enough water
7ary goal is to stop the world governments from broadcasting anymore signals into outer space
Anyways, in case anyones invested in my C2-100K:
I hurt my back 10 days ago doing a 5.5 mile run after only having done 2.5miles max up to that point. Since then I've done three 1-mile runs trying to test my back, and it aggravtes each time but less each time.
I went to a local run group run by an old college coach and he advised me to swing my arms more. I liked this idea since I've already been pretty strict with mentally cue'ing against APT. I did 3 miles total of intervals in about 40 minutes and feel fine, if not better than before I went.
I hit 15 miles on the week that I got "hurt". I have no goal for this week but if nothing hurts I'll probably do 2.5 a day with skip days and end up at 10 for the week.
9 miles
66 miles
easy, 1 week
I went from high 20 mpw to high 50 mpw overnight. I'm in my 60s. But.
I did it by walking the extra miles, then doing fartlek where I ran 50 steps of every 100m then walked the rest. Then I graduated to longer Ingebrigtsen style threshold intervals with a mile or two of walking at the end of every day thrown in. I dont run more than 1 or 2k without some kind of rest - but I dont care because I am focusing only on middle distance track stuff - 800m to mile racing.
Anytime I tried to run longer distances I got hurt and had to retrace back to the walking or 50 steps stage.
But this is my ninth week and running 57 mpw. Also if it matters its double workouts - 10k am 3k pm. Also in a big calorie deficit at the same time trying to lose weight. Dropped 10 pounds in the last month (also a lifetime best).
I've been a runner for almost 50 years now - this is the most mileage I have ever done on a consistent basis in my life. I am also hella faster than I was 10 weeks ago - intervals at 6:30 pace today versus 8+ mins then.
Sue Macdonald calls walking cross training - I agree. Also this takes a ton of time. Days when I walked all 8 miles takes 2-1/2 hours min. The real key I think is everything is short with rests between the running. And being consistent. It's been 110 days straight with no days off. If I cant run - I have to walk. No excuses.
But for me it worked. I am faster, uninjured and its zero problem now to run almost 60 mpw 7 days a week double workouts each day.
For anyone else YMMV.
river117 wrote:
What is the range of time that you could realistically get from 9mpw to 66mpw? Edit: Ignore the 6 months in title. I changed the scope of my question.
Assume you dont care about speed work or race-specific training. Any speedwork/crosstraining is purely to support increasing MPW more efficiently.
That was my attitude when I started running in the summer before my first cross country season (1985). I was a cyclist deciding I wanted to do a school sport, so I just wanted to put in the miles to get my legs used to running and see what happened before the first official practice in the fall. I ran 8 miles the first day, and then 9 miles a day, every day the rest of summer (0mpw non-runner at the start, 62 miles first week, 63 mpw the rest of the summer).
We had a high school summer running club back then, where you could try to run 500 or 750 miles over the summer. I decided I wanted to do 750 miles, so that's why I chose 9 miles a day. I could have just as easily chose 10 miles a day. Timewise, that was about the same as what I had been doing on the bike, so it didn't seem unreasonable to me, and it wasn't.
Forces put into your body are a lot lower running easy than running fast, so injury risk doing all easy running is not as high as if you were also doing speedwork. I've since run over 100,000 miles, and have never had a stress fracture, and didn't have my first overuse injuries until 20+ years after I started running (aging/hormone levels probably becoming a factor around then combined with biomechanical issues I've since fixed).
At some point mileage can to too much though. More recently, at age 50, I decided after my dog died that I wanted to run 80 mpw for a year as part of my mourning. I did, running 4,224 miles that (non-calendar) year. My legs never felt great though, it was just jogging. It's good to have legs that feel good/energetic at least once in a while, and at that age (and maybe being overweight), that was too much if I were concerned about performance (I wasn't).
Posting mostly to warn you that if you’re even moderately overweight you should be way more careful with your mileage ramp up.
im also ramping up after a long time away from running and I’ve done 15,31,42 for the past 3 weeks and planning to do just over 50 this week.
Been running really slow to make sure I stay healthy
As others have said, it depends. It depends on your sleep, your life stress, how well you recover, etc. the o my way to know is by trying. Be conservative. I’m currently building back after a long, non-running related break due to health issues. Only three years ago I was running over 100 miles per week. Recently, I’ve been surprised by how slowly I’ve had to build back after taking time off. I can get to 50-60 mpw pretty quickly, within a few weeks, but have tried to push above that and keep getting run down. Take it day by day and listen to your body. Don’t care about the mileage number for the week.
My current posterior tib tendonitis and messed up Achilles says not more than 10% volume increase per week. I haven’t ran in a week and it has gotten 0% better