Success on 140 mpw?

EDspin wrote:

NotAustin18 wrote:

[quote]Doom Doctor wrote:[/

Also, saying my times are slow is kind of rude. I mean they're not blazing fast or anything. But I like to think a 526 pace for 3.1 miles is pretty good for a regular untalented kid. And yeah, I may start pushing the long runs as I get in good enough shape to do so, because at the moment I can't do that since 20 miles still seems kind of long to me at the moment.

Not rude, but harsh. Accurate, for the most part. I wouldn't call you slow, but your times are not "pretty good" for a "regular untalented" kid. Almost every runner in the country I would call "regular" or "untalented" and yet there are still plenty of sub-15 or sub-30 runners out there.

Not slow for the general public, but for an 18yo doing >100 mpw it doesn't seem like the returns are there yet for the investment. Consider how many high school girls doing 50 mpw have faster times. Crank out some fast tempos or surge on the hills and your times should plummet with that high miles strength.

Doom Doctor wrote:

I don't think that Carpenter broke 5mm until he was in his mid 20s.

I don't know if that's true or not. But the point that the poster was making about Matt Carpenter being slow is absolutely incorrect.

I don't see how much faster you can get by upping your mileage to 140 mpw while averaging 7:30/mile. Isn't there some kind of un-written rule that states you can only run a 5k one minute per mile faster than your average training pace?

religious persian wrote:

I don't see how much faster you can get by upping your mileage to 140 mpw while averaging 7:30/mile. Isn't there some kind of un-written rule that states you can only run a 5k one minute per mile faster than your average training pace?

Slow easy mileage is fine (builds strength), the main issue is when slow mileage is all you do for long periods of time. At some point you need some faster running.

religious persian wrote:

I don't see how much faster you can get by upping your mileage to 140 mpw while averaging 7:30/mile. Isn't there some kind of un-written rule that states you can only run a 5k one minute per mile faster than your average training pace?

Very few people train that fast. That would mean mid 15 guys are doing their training at 6 minute pace, which is realistically about marathon pace for them. The tables say MP is faster, but few people meet their marathon projections.

I have one word for you

Zoloft...

Okay, more words.

I had a friend who ran 2:37 for the marathon on 60 mpw

He then trained 90 mpw for a year and ran 2:37 for the marathon.

He then trained 120 mpw for five years and.....

Ran 2:37 for the marathon.

If you can survive a year of this, you'll find out what sort of runner you are.

If it ain't in the low 15's for 5k and improving, then cut back to 60 mpw and train smarter. Because 140 mpw isn't smart,

TLW wrote:

Doom Doctor wrote:

I don't think that Carpenter broke 5mm until he was in his mid 20s.

I don't know if that's true or not. But the point that the poster was making about Matt Carpenter being slow is absolutely incorrect.

Dude was incredibly slow for the amount of hype and pub he generated. As it has been pointed out many, many times on this forum, there is a good reason why matt ducked big road races; to protect his rep.

Anyway, the point of the post is, the OP is every bit as talented as Carpenter and could also find a competitive niche if he keeps up the good training.

I'm just going to say it, 140 mpw for an 18yo is ignorant, especially without an adequate build up.

Why would you shut yourself off of getting a bachelor's degree so soon? If you really are this serious about running, why can't you concentrate on college for a few years and then spend the rest of your life running? Concentrating on college would allow you to run enough and up your miles slowly and you also get a good education.

Aren't you also the guy who wanted to start a house of runners and have everyone in it just concentrate on running? It's hard to put this nicely, but you need to open up your view of the world and see that there are more important things than just running.

That's a good point. College would provide an ideal training environment. Go to a cheap one and go to school for 5 years and train.

Tired wrote:

I'm just going to say it, 140 mpw for an 18yo is ignorant, especially without an adequate build up.

Why would you shut yourself off of getting a bachelor's degree so soon? If you really are this serious about running, why can't you concentrate on college for a few years and then spend the rest of your life running? Concentrating on college would allow you to run enough and up your miles slowly and you also get a good education.

Aren't you also the guy who wanted to start a house of runners and have everyone in it just concentrate on running? It's hard to put this nicely, but you need to open up your view of the world and see that there are more important things than just running.

Yeah I was thinking doing a house of runner's thing. One of my friends suggested it and I thought it'd be cool. But since then I've decided that probably won't work. I like running but I'm not talented, so no one cares, and like I've noticed on here most people just belittle me and call me stupid for trying to work hard. So, I would like to work hard and see what I can do. I think a sub 230 goal in 10 years would be realistic, and I'd feel really accomplished if I hit that. I'll probably try this high mileage training the rest of the summer and see how it works out for me. If it pays off and I start running some fast times, then sweet, it'd be great to have the most fun thing be the best for me. If it doesn't pay off this summer and I see little to no improvement, I'll just back it down to 90 miles a week.

I just figure I could train hard for 10 years, then relax on running and spend more time on other things. So I'm not going to just be running forever. I'm a smart guy, I do well in school, but I don't like school and don't want to end up in debt. My parents have a lot of debt and that's not how I want to live. Going to college and acquiring student loan debt wouldn't be fun, and then when you're in debt its hard to get out of. I've noticed first hand, that my parents steadily get further and further in debt not out of it. They spend most of their money and paying debts and bills and then don't have enough money left for food and have to borrow more money and get further in debt. Sometimes they even have to borrow money to make a payment on something. That's not how I want to live my life. Once you get in debt, its too hard to get out of it, so I figure just avoid getting into it in the first place. I over trained in HS doing hard workouts too frequently in a desperate attempt to earn a scholarship. I didn't get it and know unless I want to get in debt, I'm not going to get a college degree. Now I just want to run high mileage because its fun and seems like it may help me get in good shape for the longer races but apparently not according to most of the people on here.

If the high mileage doesn't work this summer, I'll try more moderate mileage around 90 miles per week. Any suggestions on a training schedule in that scenario?

Go for the big miles if that's what you want to do. But it will take time for the results to come. If you limit yourself to doing it for the summer and then dropping to 90 if you don't have impressive results you might as well just go to 90 right now.

HRE wrote:

Go for the big miles if that's what you want to do. But it will take time for the results to come. If you limit yourself to doing it for the summer and then dropping to 90 if you don't have impressive results you might as well just go to 90 right now.

That may be true. I think I'll wait and see how I hold up. High mileage is more fun than 90 mpw with intense workouts. Is it true that it takes about 6 months to fully realize the benefits of an increase in mileage?

NotAustin18 wrote:

That may be true. I think I'll wait and see how I hold up. High mileage is more fun than 90 mpw with intense workouts. Is it true that it takes about 6 months to fully realize the benefits of an increase in mileage?

HRE is right on. In my case it took 2 years of high mileage almost every single week before I made a breakthrough and saw significant improvements. I went from 32 to 30 minutes for the 10k.

I'm giving this a 9/10 since you got a lot of us to take it seriously. You lost it when you talked about you're tired of hearing about people complain about no talent when the Kenyans aren't any more talented than us. Then, you go on and talk about how you don't have any talent.

Then you talk about how you don't want to go to college and rack up any debt, so you'll just make 25-30k a year. What career are you going to have that pays that much without a degree? Do you know who has a lot of debt when they graduate? Doctors, lawyers, surgeons, physical therapists, pharmacists, etc. You know who makes a lot of money? Those guys. Your parents probably have trouble making ends meet because they made/make poor financial decisions. Heck, you can relate college to your training theory. You work hard and delay success so you can have more of it down the road. That's the same thing as going to college, going in debt in hopes that you'll come out much better down the road. Your live with parents plan is like high intensity, low volume. Yeah, you'll be further ahead in five years, but you'll be much further behind down the road.

10/10 for getting me to type all of that.

wtf are you on about.

your gonna save up enough to buy a cheap house, run 140 miles and do what?

the community college is a good idea, do that to get credits toward a useful degree. why do you wanna make 30k for the rest of your life? i don't think you have any idea how expensive things are.

You should go get a job in a city with some decent running groups and just train hard. Sponging off your parents for the next 5 years while you try to break 16 would just be a total waste of your life.

Just my $0.02. First of all, running is not the be-all, end-all. As others have mentioned, you could go to college (in state, cheap) and build your mileage up, perhaps progress as you run for a slower team - that's your "house of runners" right there. Maybe find a coach who thinks like you. However, if you don't enjoy school and would simply go to college to "get the monkey off the back" and get a useless "liberal" "arts" degree, by all means, don't go, because you will likely rack up debt with no meaningful skill set. If you go to college, get a STEM degree.

As for running, I wouldn't "count miles." Just run for time. Maybe shoot for two hours per day instead of 20 miles per day. Also, build in some deliberate "down weeks." Take a Mark Nenow approach. He trained alone generally and didn't do a lot of speedwork, but he got progressively faster on his runs as he got fit, and he pushed the hills and did a lot of threshold-type running. That was his recipe for success. Google his training.

Just remember, running, while awesome, shouldn't become an obsession to the exclusion of other things in your life. You can easily distance yourself from family, friends, a girlfriend who do not understand this singular obsession. Also, the pool of available workers lacking a tangible skillset is large, so you will be competing for even halfway decent jobs. Running is awesome, but so are so many other things in life, and a good education will give you an advantage.

That's a really hard question to answer. I was running that sort of mileage for three months before my senior cross country season in college and it was easily my best year ever. But I'd run about 100 a week during the summer before my junior season and at the time, that was my best ever season.

When you're going from big miles to really big miles, you're slamming head on into the Law of Diminishing Returns. I thought it was worth doing because diminishing returns are still returns. In three years of running that much, I went from a mid 35 for 10k to mid 32, from around 11:00 for two miles to 9:58, 3:15 for the marathon to 2:41. There's a Dane called Carsten Jorgensen who said he ran 250 km a week for two years and then ran 27:50 something for 10 km.

I think what you're doing is well worth it for someone so inclined but you aren't likely to find yourself a transformed runner in three months. A lot of people have fairly brief flings at big miles and give it up when they don't have amazing improvements quickly. The key to making it work is enjoying the process rather than fixating on results. Your posts suggest that you may be able to do that.

If you've got any spare time left over after your 20 mile days you might find this useful to read:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=1143599&page=0