So Maggie Vessey does a 4 1/2 mile LONG RUN?!?!

I have a teammate who was a junior in high school last year and ran 1:53 for the 800 off of about 10 miles per week.

The 800 is a weird event. A lot of it comes down to whether you're a 400/800 runner, or an 800/1500 guy. I dunno if it's even that simple though, it's such a bastard distance, I know I was better than a number of guys in my conference in the 400 and 1500 my sr year, but couldn't touch their times in the 800.

I swam in high school, so during spring track in hs I was doing less than 20 mpw. Sr year I ran 50.3/1:59

My freshman/soph year of college I was still swimming, so same deal, and just ran 400 hurdles, but did run a 49 and 1:55 off of ~3 interval sessions - no tempos or long runs.

Jr year had mono, so it was a wash

Sr year quit swimming and ran indoors, I also started running 50 mpw every single week in Sept, and continued through that through may. My 400 and 800 didn't get faster, but my 800 was much more consistent week in and week out. The mileage allowed me to move up and run my best pr's - 3:04 for the 1200 and 4:12 for the mile, and ran a 15:32 5k tempo run in practice.

No doubt mileage makes you a better runner, but it won't necessary make you a better 800 runner. The biggest gains are to be seen in the longer events.

friend of mine ran 1:47 at 18 (more impressively was 1:54 at 14) and he's never touched over 40 miles (64.3k's) per week/ averaged closer to (on conversion) 27 miles per week.

If a 15:32 5k is a tempo run, you were capable a 1:05-1:06 half marathon. I call BS. You either ran close to all out or your track was short.

Some people have different definitions of "tempo."

Maria Mutola ran something like 30 mpw, much of it in intervals.

Krummenaker's training week (this was BASE TRAINING) before he won world indoors over Kipketer:

2 long interval sessions a week

50-60 min long run

2-3 30 minute recovery runs (not at a slow pace)

time in the pool

Not much over 30 mpw, if that.

Plenty of 400/800 types like Jonathan Johnson on 20mpw or so.

These people are ATHLETES, not joggers with a running habit.

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Did you believe your friends at school when they told you how they only revised the night before an exam?

If you added in all the warm ups and runs they forgot to mention no way are they doing 30 mpw

Why do people on here go to extremes - one bunch saying you need 100mpw+ even for 800m and the other 20mpw - the truth is alwaus somewhere imbetween

You are right on one thing if you can do 53/54 for 400m even with rubbish training you can break 2 mins. That does not mean they are doing the right training and could not go faster! In this case I think injuries restrict the mileage but then again for a pro athlete with all medical back up they should be able to do more than 5 miles round a park without getting crocked

Obviously she'd be evern faster with more mileage. Kip Keino is said to have only run about 30-35 miles per week. Runners who can preform internationlly on low mileage exist, but they are rare outliers.

dsrunner has the day off wrote:

We can agree that there are many who run more than 60/week and never run anything close to 3:31. Hard to argue mileage

alone was the big secret to Krummenaker's success.

Guess his 144/331, another example of the dismal US running in the 90s?

Since there is basically no woman in the US who can keep up with Vessey in the 800m, without at least something close to her 52 400m speed, I'm thinking 4.5 miles for her long run is just about right. She's actually very well coached.

Krummenacker ran serious mileage under his college coach and then de Oliveira cut him back and increased the intensity, leading to David's stellar 2002-2003 season. And then he never got back to that form because he never got his mileage back up to where it had been before.

I'm not sure how you can say no woman in the US can keep up with Vessey without 52 second speed, since Alyssia Johnson ran as fast as she did in Monaco (Monaco being the best meet in the world for middle distance runners) and Pierce isn't far off either (and has beaten her every time they've met over 800m, if I'm not mistaken), and we all know Pierce isn't a 52 second 400m runner, and I don't believe Johnson is, either.

asfsf wrote:

Is that not incredible? What a talent. Are there other elite 800 runners like her? Who is the most successful athlete you've ever heard of that does less than 40 miles per week?

This sounds like pretty standard stuff for an 800 runner to me.

Concerned Citizen wrote:

fgdfsadfaf wrote:

If a 15:32 5k is a tempo run, you were capable a 1:05-1:06 half marathon. I call BS. You either ran close to all out or your track was short.

Some people have different definitions of "tempo."

Yeah, when he said tempo he meant race.

coach d wrote:

Maria Mutola ran something like 30 mpw, much of it in intervals.

Krummenaker's training week (this was BASE TRAINING) before he won world indoors over Kipketer:

2 long interval sessions a week

50-60 min long run

2-3 30 minute recovery runs (not at a slow pace)

time in the pool

Not much over 30 mpw, if that.

Plenty of 400/800 types like Jonathan Johnson on 20mpw or so.

These people are ATHLETES, not joggers with a running habit.

Krummenacker never had that type of season again because he never went back to higher volume traning he had done in the years before he started working with de Oliveira.

Jonathan Johnson won the Trials in 2004, but look at his semi-final from Athens. He was with the leaders until 600m and then had no gear in the final 200m. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's the final 30 seconds of an elite 800m that are the most aerobically fueled, or that the three men who earned medals in that final are all 4:00 minute milers (or faster).

At a conference this past weekend, Renato Canova said Seb Coe often ran 180-200k per week in training. But often when asked about mileage Coe didn't count his easy/recovery runs into the total so would say a low number. Canova said he had seen Coe do a 30k steady state run one day, and then super fast 200's the next day.

I suspect there are a decent number of elites middle distance runners who do the same thing, give you a low number but aren't counting much of their recovery runs.

laughingostrich wrote:

Concerned Citizen wrote:

Some people have different definitions of "tempo."

Yeah, when he said tempo he meant race.

agreed

the 800 meter dash is the longest sprint on the track. the brutality of the event is that, more than any other race on the track, it requires both speed and endurance, or as peter coe put it, endurance at speed. every 800 meter runner's natural abilities lean more towards endurance or speed. i.e. they're either a 400 meter guy stepping up (think joaquim cruz) or a 1500 guy dropping down (think peter coe). if vessey belongs to the former category, 4 1/2 miles on a long run is nothing to freak out about, nor would it be if someone from the latter category did an 8 miler but didnt spend 4 days a week doing speed work on the track.

basically, she develops enough aerobic capacity to support her anaerobic for 2 minutes. she'd tank in a 1500

I was there and Renato Canova never said anything like that. The claim of 180km for Coe was made by some anonymous poster on letsrun without attribution.

lol you guys jealous you could never even sniff those times? btw he ran 4:12. 15:32 is not all out by any means.

sub4miler55 wrote:

lol you guys jealous you could never even sniff those times? btw he ran 4:12. 15:32 is not all out by any means.

Actually I've run 4:08 and 14:48.

But back on track, "not all out" and "tempo run" are two TOTALLY different things.

Hey, it wasn't actually a race, it was during practice - prescribed as a tempo, but once I went through the first mile in 5:08, I just decided to crank it down a bit and see if I could set a record for our 5k tempo loop (it's on a certified usatf course right by school, basically a rectangle, so you don't have to stop anywhere).

And actually for a 4:12 miler, mcmillian prescribes a tempo pace of 4:55-5:08 - so I was actually within reason.

An equivalent 5k performance to my mile would have been 14:33 - so I was sadly pretty far off. Had I crushed some more miles maybe I would have gotten under 15 :) Which was the point of my original post! Unfortunately, in typical letsrun fashion, we've obsessed ourselves with a random comment instead of the intended point.