Guys back in the day ran 130mpw hard, how did they recover?

False premises leads to a false conclusions.
- No one was running 130mpw hard. My easy pace was 5:45, except when needed. Many runs were 6-6:15
- We took time off.
- 20 times a year is a problem? More than that. In college we raced over 30x year. Racing was a social event among friends.
- Poor diets? Nope.
- No fueling during races? Why would you? Marathons, yes I wish we had that.
- Rarely over-trained, but is has happened a time or two. Listen to your body.

We didn't spend all day b*tching about other runners or their strava.

You either confirmed or didn't refute a single thing I've said after saying "false premises leads to a false conclusion". Other than than, great post.

They had balls

If you are going to post Rodgers logs make sure that you read then. I see a lot of runs at 6:30 or slower.

You are as bad at reading my post as you demonstrated by your reading of Rodgers breakout year 1975.

Malmo trained and raced in that era. He knows the greats from that time. Ghost of Igloi can also verify how running was in that era.

Everyone has balls, only now the women have balls too, LITERALLY.

Running on concrete ruined it! I see even professionals today running a lot on hard surfaces! Back then 90% was on dirt!

There was certainly some rounding up. We had a loop our coach told us was 13 and I recently GPSed it at 11.8. However that loop had a 1000 foot climb in the middle of it, so it was still pretty hard. I don't think there is a world where 83 rounds up to 130 though.

Rodgers was TOUGH. Shorter was TOUGH. Before his first marathon, Salazar's coach told him, you're going to do a 20 mile run with these guys then there is a 10k race at the end. For the most part, training was simpler as well. 10 Hard was not an uncommon entry into my high school logs. I don't know how many high school programs have that anymore. Don't get me wrong, we have good understanding of training now and we're seeing some very fast times as a result, but dudes ran a lot back then and they ran a fair amount of long hard runs and this got them pretty fast.

Not everyone was TOUGH, but there were enough of them training hard that we had some pretty good results.

To summarize. They had balls.

How is that "reverse" Badger miles? That's the literal definition of Badger miles.

This is not a "back in my day thing", but back in my day, to measure mileage this how we did it

1. drive the route in a car. If that wasn't possible then.....

2. Drive the portions you could and then add in parts that you could not drive (the route I mentioned earlier went up one road, connected to a fire road that you couldn't drive, then went down a road on the other side of the hill).

3. Badger miles it if you were in somewhere new and hadn't measured your route. So, If I knew (from repeated runs on courses of a known distance) that my easy pace was around 7:00 and I ran for an hour, I knew I'd run about 8.5 miles.

Most of the runners I knew were very serious about keeping track of their mileage

First, I am not sure how widespread that was. Guys ran easy. The Gainesville guys (Shorter, Galloway (RIP), and others) would do long runs only as fast as the slowest guy wanted or could go.

Also, if you look at their times, you will they are considerably slower than today's times. They were winning races in the US because the East Africans had not return in part due to national strife and civil unrest (or boycotts).

Absolutely not. Obviously some running was done on soft ground but most of us ran mostly on roads. One of Bill Rodgers' main venues was a 1.6 mile asphalt path around Jamaica Pond.

I recall reading that Mark Nenow did his second run at night. That couldn’t have been on dirt/grass in Lexington?

Speaking of Nenow, I recall that he basically just did about two hours of running every day, mostly in two runs (longer and shorter) w one long run on Sunday, and not terribly structured. He just went according to how he felt, but a lot of it was fast, over hilly terrain, and he got so fit that 6:00 per mile was quite easy. That “lack of structure” got him to 13:18 and 27:20, long before super shoes and Epo and double threshold.

That’s what I think of when I think of old-timers. But I doubt Nenow did this 140-150 mpw every single week of the year. I’m sure he had some downtime too.

Not much of that running was really hard/fast. Many of those miles were comfortable steady state as fast as they wanted to go at that time. Fast continuous runs like 10 miles easing into it, and then maybe under current half marathon pace for the last half.

It was time efficient running- just get out the door and get your miles in sometimes at a quick but sustainable pace. None of this get in a car to drive to a nicer place to run, warm up easy, stop and take off some clothes/get a drink and a gel, maybe change shoes, do repeats constantly glancing at your GPS watch, change shoes and clothing again to warm down, then drive home.

There were fewer people then and traffic was not as bad, so you had road training loops you could do directly from your home without risking injury or death.

A good fit runner could sustainably average over 120 miles a week like that devoting 15 hours or less to running every week.

There were no cell phones, no home computers, no cable TV, no internet. network tv was limited, few distractions.

Part of that was because there was no internet to find places to drive to run. You found places running from home or friends shared routes with you. Best you could do otherwise would be road maps - which don't really give information about conditions. Being able to run from home due to there being half as many cars on the road sounds lovely though.