Guy in club disobeyed coaches orders and went from 60mpw -> 100mpw. Just two months later and he’s smashing all of us.

What are his race times? Is he really smashing people? My guess is in a couple months he'll be injured or burnt out.

"life had far fewer distractions and competing priorities than we do today" and "There was little else for folks like him to do but run all the time." I guess you're joking but if not could you justify those assertions. Back in the 60s and 70s my parents had less free time than people do now because basic things like shopping, washing clothes, cooking, commuting, banking and paying bills took longer than now. Spending all your free time on social media isn't a good excuse for not having the time to train.

So doing a 100mpw he's just discovered Lydiard. What a revelation.

That was my thinking as well. Using words like "disobeying" and "orders" made me question this whole thread. Not to mention the grammatical error.

I used to work with a coach like that. Totally ruined my opinion of the dude.

Not too surprising. Running volume this high has been proven again and again to drastically improve stamina and aerobic potassium. It increases blood count. It helps physiologically in all kinds of ways.

Of course, those who are injury prone may have a difficult time maintaining, but people who can run volume this high almost always substantially improve. It's what's worked for most runners most of the time for the last 60 + years. Arthur Lydiard's entire training philosophy is predicated on high volume. A lot of athletes have gone from chumps to becoming at the very least better than average. High volume is in most cases not going to allow someone with low talent to be better than those with high talent, but my God, it's the best way for someone with little talent to run at least reasonably objectively well.

You take a young man who has trouble breaking 5 in the mile and put him on a 100 mile per week periodization program and he'll be breaking 4:20 and 14:30. That's what some of Lydiard's less talented slow twitch guys did, and some of them ran PRs like that and that was over half a century ago. Most young men, otherwise healthy, can run around 4:15, 14:25, and a 2:25 marathon. It's not going to get them on an Olympic team, but that doesn't matter. Most runners are capable of running those kinds of times from high volume training, but they don't because of fear, training misinformation, health problems, and perhaps a lack of adequate time and resources.

Of course, slow high volume in and of itself will not produce much results and must be constantly balanced with quality optimal intensity. The periodization program developed by Lydiard and others accounts for this. Phase 1: slow volume buildup and maintenance. Phase 2: Some moderate intensity applied to volume. Phase 3: Threshold and speed development. Phase 4: Goal Pace Interval Training. Phase 5 Tapering mileage, peaking, and faster than race pace, short rest between intervals. Or some variation on the above. It's practically a proven science, if most people follow it, it will work for them except in rare individual cases.

I was part of a group years ago who had a chance to listen to a lecture given by Frank Shorter on high volume training. He said that probably nobody ever needs to run more than 20 miles per day (140 per week) and that there needs to be easy recovery days and that he personally thought that 800 meter repeats were the best workout for improvement after a high volume mileage base buildup. Some of the pros have run more weekly volume than this; Cam Levins, Kelvin Kiptum, Gerry Lindgrun (Who knows?), Haile Gebreselassie, and others, but most of the pros haven't. It's just worth noting.

While you had to wait until you were 70 years old to discover cross-training. You are so patronizing and yet so ignorant yourself.

A guy having difficulty breaking 4:30, might be able to improve to 4:20/14:30 with 100mpw, but not one struggling to break 5:00. A 4:20 mile requires decent top end speed and high mileage won’t help in that area.

They don't like people with common sense. Trust me, I know, I used to not like people with common sense either.

High mileage will not help someone's top end speed but it will do a lot to allow you to run at closer to that top end speed for a longer time. Lydiard used to tell a story about an old guy from his neighborhood called Willis who he met at a track one night when he had some of the guys he was coaching there. Willis, Arthur said, was rolling on the ground gasping for breath and told Arthur his doctor told him to get some exercise by running. So Willis had done a set of 220s and it wrecked him. Arthur got him to jog easily and do nothing else for several weeks and after that Willis did another set of 220s faster and more easily than he'd done in that previous set. Willis didn't improve his top end speed at all but was able to run at closer to it and for a longer time by improving his endurance.

Peter Snell told me he'd once been at a conference organized by John Chapman to look into why US distance runners were so frequently outkicked at the end of races and what to do about it. He said they'd brought in all sorts of sprint experts who talked about various things that could be done to improve top end speed.

"They were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," Peter told me. "They didn't understand that the problem isn't that these runners didn't have sufficient speed. It's that they don't have enough endurance to be able to use that speed at the end of a hard race."

Good Story FP. I went to a D1 Mid Atlantic School in the late 70's. Ran 100 MPW for my first 3 summers. Indiviually quailfied out of my region for the NCAA X-C Finals my junior year. For senior year, we got a new Coach---his initials are RR. He told me to run 50MPW for the summer instead of 100 heading into my senior year. Like an idiot, I listened to him. Destroyed my season... I was running 25:30 and 31:50 instead of 24:40's (5MI) and 30:40's (10K). It took until the NCAA X-C Finals to get some fitness back and break 31:00 again.

GOOD COACHING MATTERS!; College age kids need it.

I have lousy top end speed, so you're incorrect.

I define lousy 400m speed as 60 seconds. If that’s your speed as well, you ain’t running 4:20.

But you said "top end speed" so you were wrong. 400 speed isn't top end speed is it?

400m times define speed for distance runners and there’s not much that can be done to improve them. With your lousy speed, what was your 400 best?

Yes! But what improves your ability to recover? Therefore being able to add more mileage? Training the body by adding more mileage.

Thus the balancing act. Think Sisyphus and his rock. Always leaning on it, never pushing it up the hill too hard, but never letting it fall back. Just steady progression that never ends.

In the first handful of months of the Covid lockdowns, I found myself with a not particularly heavy workload, and two hours of my day when I was no longer commuting. I brought my mileage from 45 to 80, and couldn't believe how much stronger I got. I was pretty dang tired (I'm over the hill and still did have a full-time job), but managed to hang onto that increase for quite a few months. Definitely encourage taking at shot at the mileage if you can.

I see so many thinking there’s a shortcut to success, wondering why they run 34 for a 10k when their Garmin tells them their in 30 min shape on 35 miles per week.

For me 80 mpw is the minimum but 100 is where the magic happens.