High school training in the 70s... was it really this insane?!?

And once you were comfortable covering a measured route at a particular pace you were confident estimating a new route. Six miles in 36 minutes out and back to 24 Sussex today means I covered five miles in 30 minutes at the same pace on the river trail today. It wasn’t exact. And we didn’t care—we still improved.

I think a lot of the practice was seen similar to football practice. You showed to "work hard" "run till you puke" "build up a pain tolerance". Nobody was talking about vo2max, and lactate clearance, blah blah blah.

They were tossing a lot of mud against the wall and seeing what would stick. For the runners that could handle it, a lot of us came out with some nice performances, although I'd say that they were often unpredictable. I might run great the second meet of the year, then spend the rest of season chasing that. Sometimes I did peak at the right time... sometimes.

99.9% of HS runners will never race in anything beyond a turkey trot 5k after HS. This should not be a concern.

EVEN IF a kid is "cooked" by his senior year in HS, they could easily recover from that within 6mo- a year of some low key running/down time. The idea that because you ran hard in HS and are therefore "done" when you are 19 years old is asinine.

I tried to do that in the early 80s. 10 weeks at 110mpw when I was 15/16. It did not end well. And I did not improve as much as I had hoped. I now believe my endocrine system was damaged as a result of this training.

The truth is that your talent is the baseline, and all additional work is subject to decreasing marginal returns.

Yes, and I think that's why there can be so much confusion about how to train. You can look at Coe, Ryan, Chappa, etc.. and see big variation on how they trained, but they were all great. I think the truth is they all would have been really good no matter what they did.

After reading this thread, I am starting to understand why boomers always talk about running being bad for your knees etc..

I take your point, I absolutely do. But I think of a summer as 12-13 weeks, so roughly 77-84 per week. Call it 80. It’s a reach for a high schooler but not so ridiculous that most kids couldn’t do it as upperclassmen. As long as they stay within themselves and don’t hammer anything.

Freshman year in college we ran 70 mpw, and I remember thinking how high that was, that “this was real training.” But 70 is just getting started. You’re correct that there may be diminishing returns after 70, and it isn’t necessary for 98% of runners. Certainly 100 mpw in high school isn’t for everyone. But the main thing is there is a tendency to hammer everything at that age, and that taxes the body far more than the actual mileage.

Agree completely. I don't think this idea of "burnout" is really applied well. In the examples I gave in my original post, all three of Serna, Hulst, and Nelson ran in college at some level. Serna was a great runner at UCI and Hulst was on the team with him for a bit. Nelson had other issues at Oregon but was on their team that finished 2nd his freshman year and continued to run at Glendale CC after he left Oregon.

C

And those were the best guys in the country not to mention Craig Virgin who broke the two mile record. My school wasn't as insane but the training philosophy at the time was the Lydiard Method after famed coach Arthur Lydiard, and coaches thought that very high mileage was the key. Unfortunately some of these guys blew up from over training and
Eric Hulst actually died young and some believe his embolism was contributed to by pushing himself passed all reasonable limits at a young age.

True, but there were also fewer opportunities post college. And fewer track/cross country programs at the college level. JC's, Colleges/Universities that have programs today did not have them back in the 70's.

Those guys did train hard. For some, the reward was burning out young. Move it back to the 60s even. You have to love Jim Ryun, but it's an understatement to say he burned out from overtraining while young. Still one of the greatest ever.

Hulst died from GBM, not an embolism.

I guess this is where I’m coming in and saying the 1000-mile summer (12-13 weeks) is eminently more doable with high reward/risk and room for more improvement in the ensuing years versus the 100-110+ that many of those guys were running back then. Ritz was up to 90 in high school, as was Hall, though I guess you could argue Hall’s career was curtailed because of it and Ritz was constantly injured.

Ok, I've seen this posted so often but I don't think this is true. From my understanding, Ryun retired after Munich because it was no longer a viable career option for him at that point in his life. There was a thread not that long ago talking about the fact that Ryun continued racing into the 80s on the roads. While Ryun's training in high school/college was insane, it seems like he handled it just fine for years. I think the reality back then was just that at a certain point you were supposed to grow up and have other things take priority over your running. I mentioned Nelson earlier and I believe one of the big factors that caused him to leave running was that he had a daughter while at Glendale CC, so then he had to work to support his young family. I'm sure a lot of people were the same way.

As HRE mentioned, this is basically how most people are with running anyways. When you're in high school/college, you have the time and motivation to keep running but eventually, unless you're at the very top of the top, other things in life have to take priority. I think it's admirable how long a lot of these guys kept at it, despite the limited financial opportunities. What I always love about looking back at the 70s running era was that it was done pretty much purely for the love of the game. Pre was on food stamps working working as bar tender, Shorter would get a couple hundred bucks here and there under the table but was still going to school, and many more worked odd jobs to make ends meet while still chasing the dream for a time.

Somebody else mentioned that those kids, 70s and 80s kids were just built different. And that is true. We were constantly outside, playing soccer, football, basketball, hockey, skateboarding, whatever until the sun went down. Riding bikes everywhere. In essence, “training” during the formative years versus starting from scratch. High level soccer is like a constant fartlek every damn day.

This burnt out from training too much and too hard business about Ryun comes up all the time from all sorts of people. But you know who it doesn't come up from? Ryun. He's always said that he retired when he did because he wasn't able to find a job that allowed him to support himself and his family and still do the things he'd to do to continue as a world class runner. But he was still running, sometimes quite a bit into his masters' years.

Ignorance was bliss. As a freshman in the mid-70's, my only point of reference was that Jim Ryun ran 3:55 in HS. So that's the standard I set for myself, literally, to run a 3:55 mile (or at least break 4). I never did, but I trained with that goal in mind. We knew our running pace because we ran on the track for a known distance, and could fairly accurately compare the pace we were running on the road and thereby determine the distance. In the long run (pun intended) what you ran in training didn't matter anyway, only what you ran in competition.

He also lived in the shadow of the magical kingdom.