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

This type of stuff always struck me as proof positive that HS doping isn’t widespread in the modern era. Most banned substances don’t make you faster, they make you more able to handle the stuff that makes you faster. If guys were doing this stuff in the 70s and were clean, you think modern kids need drugs to run 70-80 mpw with some controlled double tempos?

In the early 80's in New Jersey, we ran 3 miles to the park to w/u, then 3-5 of miles of work, who knows what the paces where really, then 3 miles back to school with the last 400 meters or so around the school were always a race. Thats a min of 9 miles per day M-F. NO WAY could I get my SoCal high school runners to do that. And we had very good runners and the a female winner of the Kinny XC one year.So the training worked. Simple and so effective. Too. many distractions for the. kids these days. My 2 cents

LOL, you know the 70s did occur after the advent of the printing press and modern anatomy studies. So, we did understand slow vs. fast twitch fiber, periodization, pacing etc. Lactate was one area that was rather misunderstood so the focus was more on VO2 max. However, we seemed to find lactate pace somewhat naturally. For instance, we used to run "handicap" runs where the slower runners would start first and the faster last based upon an expected hard run pace (not race pace). Probably was in the range of a threshold run and did it every couple of weeks. Also did a fair amount of progressive runs as well.

My son's now retired high school coach was 2 X NAII XC champ in the early 70s (when NAII was very competitive) and finished top 10 in the 10k at the 72 Olympic trials as a collegiate senior. Was a little Italian guy built like a Kenyan. Asked him why he didn't continue to train and he said "because I had a family to support!".

In addition to what’s already been said in the thread. We used to do workouts on the gravel roads with intervals of things like telephone poles. Ie run hard till you pass 2 telephone Poles then jog past 1 - repeat 10x. Exact splits weren’t really a concern for workouts. You went on feel and in comparison to your buddies most of the time.

Same here. Would also go out to the local public course before dusk and run tee to green workouts the same way. The 70s were a magic time for distance running and that's not a criticism in anyway of today's runners. Training was quickly evolving and times were dropping dramatically. Races were 10Ks or odd distances (even HS courses often varied in length). Plus the top "pros" actually raced much of year. I got to see Shorter, Rogers and others at some of the big local races.

We were an average HS program (coach didn't have a distance background as another poster referenced). Most of us didn't start until sophomore year (me junior year) because 9th grade was separate and there was no JR high program. Still we ran 40 to 50 miles a week. And plenty of 12 X 400 back in the day during track season! I bought Running the Lydiard Way and a book about cross country running by Marc Bloom that summarized the training of top HS athletes of the day, one being Chris Fox. They were all running 100 mile weeks and I decided to do the same before my senior year and promptly got hurt LOL. Settled on about 60 miles a week and it worked out okay.

I ran high school in the late 70s in So Cal. The biggest thing I would add is that we ran EVERYTHING hard except shakeouts the day before big races. Any easy 8-miler down to XYZ and back would start out fine and then turn into a death race on the way back, ratcheting down the pace, everyone pushing to see who would break first and who could hang on longest. It just seemed like the way to do it then.

We had a lot of established routes with known distances, but we never worried about hitting a weekly number. Also, you didn't know what you were running that day until you showed up to practice. (I was lucky in that two of the three coaches I had knew something about training.) Some days it was "Rat Beach loop, run the uphills hard," but some days we didn't even know what we were running until the next rep: "Fast quarters on a two-minute cycle. I'll tell you when you're done" or "Three 660s at mile pace, two minute rest, then we'll move on to the next set."

Only a couple of us did two-a-days, and only as seniors and only short AM runs on our own to ensure we didn't race the easy runs.

Oh yes, you never knew what was coming. We always knew Wednesday was “hard” day (I can still remember the apprehension of showing up to practice on early season Wednesdays) but to your point we didn’t think about weekly totals at all.
Workouts were all done hard like you said. If you didn’t go hard and maybe saved something for another rep or another day you were “sandbagging” which was just about the worst sin you could commit as far as your teammates were concerned.

These posts are spot on. I ran hard almost every day. Everything turned into a race and the coaches seemed to encourage it. I started running at age 9, but burned out at age 16 due to injury after injury from too much hard efforts. I remember at least 3 lower leg stress fractures. Despite the injuries, I did love all of it.

My college coach had a good idea on how to track our distance for keeping our log books - If the run was <10 miles round down to the nearest mile, if >10 mile round up. It was fairly easy to figure out within a mile how much we did. From the easy and the hard miles on a track, you pretty much know what 5:30 pace feels like vs 6:00 pace vs 8:00 pace. If we did our usual midweek 50 minute run and the group moved along pretty good, that was probably about 6:00 pace so 8.x miles. call it 8 in the daily log. If we went out for an easy Sunday run and chatted throughout, it was probably around 8:00 pace, so if we were out 90 minutes call it 12.

As far as pacing, I would guess we ran too hard too often. When I look back on my training logs, I know I did and I suspect it cost me a bit of longevity in my post-college career. My weren't looking at heart rate at all. I did some heart rate training when I was on ski team but the original Polar wrist monitors were very very basic.

Years later I went back and ran or biked a bunch of our old routes with GPS. We were pretty close on all our regular routes. The one we called 8 that we ran once or twice a week turned out was 8.4 if you went the long way and 7.9 if you cut off one section (which we did occasionally).

When I started coaching I switched our durations to time based as opposed to distance based. If we were doing a loop from campus I'd ask the faster team members to add on at the end if they got back short of the target time. That also made it so there wasn't any incentive to run those days faster than they needed to which got us to them not going too hard on days that were supposed to be basic mileage recovery days.

No doubt many of them trained like animals. You can't run that fast without it. Some did a ton on intervals, some did a ton of volume.

I graduated HS late 80s, College after '90. Had a Timex Ironman watch. In college my coach experimented with HR monitors but gave up given the big differences between runners and that we only had a few of them because they were expensive.

So we ran by feel and by time. Usually the coach gave us workouts by time. Ex. Run 60min easy, strides & drills after. Only track intervals were distance based.

I was comparing logs with a teammate in college and his mileage totals were 10mi/wk more than mine. Turns out he was using Run Time divided by 6min/mi. I was using 7min/mi. I never cracked 90mpw. He managed a bunch of 105-110mpw, but we ran the same every day! We were probably both wrong about the pace.

Even road races were not accurate. Road races would vary wildly. Yea, hills, etc, but an experienced runner knows when a course is way off and a lot of them were. People would claim a new PR after a race that I was sure was short based on my track times. Many people I ran with after college had amazing PRs, but when I drilled down, their track times didn't match up. Triathletes were the most notorious for this.

So take mileage with a grain of salt. Especially things like a 3 mile weekly run in 14:30 in practice. It was probably 2.75mi.

Good assessment overall, but please remember that it was the 1970s, not the 1870s!

We were able to measure our running path relatively accurately with a car and/or a wheel-on-a-stick, and we actually did have good stopwatches... stopped using the Flintstones sundial wristwatches several years earlier than that.

My HS coach was an 8:30 steepler in the 70s in college and also very strong in cross and the 5K. Every summer he ran 10 in the morning and 15 at night with Sundays off. That math = 150/week and a lot of injuries.

Your father thought you and all of your generation - me included- were soft.

What's funny was this was the thing with Serna's training that raised my eyebrow when reading. I honestly don't usually bat an eye at big mileage totals from this era, as whatever the actual number of miles is, it's clear the guys from this era ran A LOT. But seeing a workout schedule peppered with 3 mile workouts in the low 15s and under, that's basically a race! Now, Serna was a low 14 minute 5k guy on the track in HS but still I'd think these efforts would be tough to hit regularly. But then again, there's probably a mix of loose mileage and also just the attitude that "hard is good" which is definitely common theme I see among the era.

It is funny to me to also see the pre-GPS watch era treated somewhat like this distant past where people were just bushwhacking trails and pulling mileage numbers out of the splits of their shorts. As mentioned earlier, until my junior year of HS (early 2010s) no one on my team had a GPS watch and all mileage came straight from the coaches' mouths. Street runs were pretty accurate but I remember we had a summer route on a horse trail that was said to be 7 miles. We usually didn't time runs so there wasn't a whole lot of evidence of short routes until we got the GPS watches. I would've definitely noticed something was up when I ran 35 minutes for 7 miles as that would've been a PR from 2 miles on up en route. Turns out it was just about 5 miles. Again, I'd imagine these guys who were serious competitors had a better sense of their efforts and mileage than my crappy HS team but it does speak a bit to how things can get lost without a concrete point of accuracy.

That and we ran for time. Even though we knew we were running much faster everything was calculated by time if you didn't know the distance driving it. So an 8 mile run was 56 minutes even though most of it was faster than 7 min / mile. Ran a lot and fast... if you didn't get injured you got fast!

And the shoes were better then too... hahahahahaha

Yes, unfortunately, I do.

I think the shoes and bicarb allow what would otherwise necessitate using PEDs. 70-80 mpw w a couple double thresholds and perhaps a long run in high school is almost perfect.

I used to measure routes by car . I had a can of spray paint in my car for miles marks on the road where there were no significant landmarks. If I was in an unfamiliar place I would estimate the distance by time.