How much of your 10k potential can you hit running 40mpw?

We sort of already have that. You have all the people who have great senior years, barely improve senior year cause they do the same training, and then have massive improvements as freshmen.Oviously this is all loose correlations with lots of other factors.

But feel free to give us the link to the college program that is only running 40mpw and having their athletes improve over 4 years. I expect to be waiting a long. A few athletes don't improve with more volume than 40 but most do.

Nah the other guy is right.

The real thing with racing is you can reach a peak. Just not often.

If you aren't in ideal shape, you'll hurt more, take you longer to recover, and you won't be able to do it again the next week.

Training is great. But top athletes replicate top performance. That's a result of their preparation

Even if you are a jogger, but then there are other factors in your lack of performance

Seems like Peter Coe addressed this in his book many years ago that most gains are achieved in the first 60 mpw, and anything after is diminishing returns.

However, there is a lot of physiology that supports all the mileage beyond a certain point is helping achieve gains in running economy. Do we think Peter Snell would’ve achieved what he did off 40 mpw versus the Lydiard 100 mpw he actually did? I don’t.

Lastly, I once had a coach who believed in lower mileage, and he had a very interesting approach —

Su - long run 16 mi

M - Hard effort fartlek - 8 mi w wup/cdown

T - very easy 4-6

W - medium long run up tempo 12ish mi

R - hard effort 5 mi tempo - 8 mi total

F - very easy 4-6

Sa - off or cross training bike, swim, xc ski

I realize this was mid 50 mpw, but it was effective!

ran mid 15s in hs (XC) on 40 mpw, mid 14's as a college freshman training on my own on 45 mpw

Sample week

Monday - 6 steady (5:40) with 1 mile warmup
Tuesday: 3 mile tempo (5:10); 12x400 5k-ish or slightly faster (68-70); 8 miles total
Wednesday: 3/3 easy/recovery
Thursday: 6 easy/steady
Friday: 6x800 in 2:25, 5 miles total
Saturday: 10-13 mile long run
Sunday: off

👆

So the 40 mpw 40%-97% potential training plan for 10km is:

- 2 long runs one slower/longer one faster and shorter

- 1 Tempo,

- 1 intervall

60 is 50% more than 40. That is a lot more running. Spivey ran a lot of good 1500s off that. Supposedly Lagat did also. Heck didn't Kennedy run like a 13:10 off that. The. He bumped it to 120 to break 13. Twice as much work for a dozen seconds.

I doubt Snell runs as well off 40. But he might have been a faster 800m guy with 60 (and a good diet to keep the weight off instead of mileage). We will never know. He believed in his program and it was good enough.

Interesting. Would you actually expect someone doing <10mpw with 13:5x potential to get sub 18? That'd only be say 2 runs a week of about 4/5mi which at around that pace would only be about 50/60 minutes of actual running. Do walk-ons with sub 20 from zero activity levels actually exist?

Much faster. I didn't run a step for 3 years after college and ran a 34:40 10k with friends for charity. I finished 3rd and was stiff for several days. I assume I could have run 16:30 for 5k. My PR was only 14:25.

About 95% if you're talented.

I can settle this definitively.

With 40 mpw and chaotic training/racing/coaching I ran 39:40.

Upping mileage and removing chaos, I rapidly improved to the high 35min range at about 60 mph.

After several years of 70 mpw I ran my pb of 35:00. (I'm female)

These are some rough categories

> 65 mpw - for a 10k or shorter, this is starting to get into elite/sub-elite training territory

50 - 65 mpw - you're pretty close to your best, the vast majority of regular people's bodies start to get injured if they push beyond this point, and most gains wont be worth the risk of injury for many non-competitive runners. Gains are typically less than a minute when pushing beyond the limits of this group for a 10k with no other changes to intensity of training

35 - 49 mpw - this is serious training for your typical runner. Many of the top highschool athletes are in this category. A good balance of injury risk and aerobic gains are achieved in this range. Its not uncommon for the 10k pb to drop by one or even a couple minutes by increasing milage

25 - 34 mpw - you'll get some results from this level of training, but gains from more mileage are quite easy to achieve. It is not uncommon for a 10k pb to drop by over three to five minues by substantialy increasing the miles.

< 24 mpw - its hard to even know what your potential is, gains can exceed 5 minutes by substanially increasing mileage.

this seems relevant to my situation so i’ll elaborate. i ran a 35:07pb this fall avging 55km for 8weeks while only getting in 9 wo’s. this was due to having a low ferritin count throughout the summer and into the fall of 17-23. this was also my second time racing the distance. for clarity, i’m male, 36 y/o and have been running for 2 1/2 years. i can’t help but wonder what being healthy and running a consistent 70mi a week would bring me down to? maybe it would add to my seemingly endless array of little injuries but just maybe, it would condition me into an area of true potential…hoping to work up to that for a hm this spring.