Emma Coburn Ridiculous Biking Schedule

Maybe this is a biased Brit perspective, but Harry Wilson (born 1926) had his middle distance athletes on high mileage (Ovett went up to 120 miles per week prior to Moscow 1980), Harry being influenced by Australian coach Percy Cerutty (born 1895).

I don’t see the connection to East Africa. High mileage, running-only training has been around for a long time.

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Harry Wilson

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/duncanmackay

Harry Wilson, who has died aged 72, was a name known only to the cognoscenti of the athletics world. But he played a huge part in the unprecedented success British middle-distance running enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s by dis...

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Former pro cyclist, now a dedicated masters runner.

What you seek cannot be found, young gun. Many a man has died trying to find the mythical city of El Dorado. It is far better to just assume it does not exist and act accordingly.

In all seriousness: If the training you described actually worked, people would be doing it. (In meaningful numbers, not just one-offs like Valby.) Science is never going to prove or disprove because trying to do so would be damn near impossible.

Having tried to make the transition, I believe the limiter is something about the biomechanical differences that creates a steep curve of diminishing returns.

You might say excessive, but all elite training looks excessive to the average slob who's never achieved anything.

That's a bit of a red herring. 120 miles/week is charitably 16h/w at 8:00/m or more realistically 14h/w at 7:00/m.

High mileage running only training has, as a matter of course, been around for a long time as it's the simplest and most accessible of the training modalities. That doesn't mean it's optimal. To this point, and @former pro cyclist 2 's point, just because its the most accessible method doesn't mean it's the best.

I'm not saying 12h/w runners should add in a few hours to get to ~16h/w as a fix-all. I'm saying there's merit to the idea that adding ~20h/w of cycling/focused cross training to ~10h/w of running may be better. It's at least worth looking into. Every other endurance sport has landed on somewhere between 20-40h/w as the optimal.

(I totally understand the game at play here. If you're a generational talent, or believe yourself to be so, there's very little incentive to break the mold of training norms. This transcends individual sports. Why take such a big risk when you can win anyway?)

Little insight just because you are Ivy League does not mean you are above everyone else. I work with plenty of Ivy League graduates and MIT graduates that are moron's and can't properly do an easy task.

What I am trying to say is that if your hypothesis is incorrect because no elite runners do it. If it worked everyone would be doing it.

Modern training theory has been around for 60 years. That is a LOT of runners to test, try, experiment, etc. If 20 hours of cycling and 10 hours of running produced top runners, we would already know that because I promise you, someone has tried.

Again, my theory is that the mechanics of running are so specific, so individualized, that high volumes of cross-training would have a hugely negative effect on biomechanics.

I thought when Lukas verzbikas was dominating while training for triathlons with a ton more training, that we would see a huge increase in cross training.

It makes sense you can add cardio without impact. There are a couple runners like Allie O and Valby that seem to not run 7 days a week, but it hasn’t taken off and people have had plenty of time to mess with it.

it seems to only be helpful to stay in shape when injured, but that’s just a guess.

Heart rate monitor is not accurate due to stress, what you ate that day, temperature, amount of sleep among others. Use that only for recovery days. A power meter is a true measurement in watts of what effort comes out from what you put in.

Half (or more) of the posters on here have running and exercise addiction. People come on here with an injury and lose their minds if they can’t run for 3 days. That’s not normal.

she’s a professional and is running out of years to compete at the top level, of course she’s eager. Exercising is all she’s done her entire life and it’s a big part of her self-worth.

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No, there is a lot of inertia that tends to prevent big shifts in thinking. Athletes as a group are risk adverse to try things outside the norm. See the double threshold training that really isn't new, but is very different compared to the norm in percentage of work at those intensities. It's only picked up steam because of the results of one athlete.

Not training, but normal road bike tires were once wider pre-1970s, then got really skinny in the 1980s. My road bikes that I got in the 1980s, like most of mid-high level racing bikes of all brands were spec'd with 20mm-wide clinchers, even if sewups used by pros were often a bit wider. It was "common sense" that narrow was faster, and yes testing should have easily been sophisticated enough to tell the difference. It's not hard to do roll down tests, and they put a man on the moon in the 1960s. Then in the '90s, the industry realized they were dumb in the 1980s and 23mm was the "perfect width". 28mm–32mm tires were still for the touring bikes and rec riders. Now those widths are more frequently seen on pro bikes than 25mm. All along those wider tires could have been standard and faster. It would have been no problem for a tire maker to have used their most supple, low rolling resistance tires in the 1980s to produce fast 30mm tires, but race teams had hangups about width. At the cobbled classics, they would go wider, but still were self limiting themselves from the optimal because it seemed too wide. Now we see 2.2"/55mm tires are actually fast on gravel, when the majority was riding much narrower a couple years ago. There is just a lot of inertia in human behavior.

That's why I loved the Nils Van Der Poel training discussion here when it came up a few years ago. Only a few people willing step outside the current norm.

Bell recently said she bikes about 100 miles a week. That’s not a lot but enough for an 800/1500m runner. What kind of biking is Coburn doing? Is she out on the road or on a Pelaton? If she is doing 3 hours on the road, in zone 2, climbing, it could definitely be beneficial at this in her career. She and Joe always seem to be looking for that silver bullet though.

Who I wished would be asked about cycling is Rai Benjamin. He took it up at the end of his last comp season. He was out there climbing through the hills of LA. Has he kept it up? Did he find it helpful? I’m convinced it has made him stronger, fitter and kept him healthy. Something different, especially if you’re going up against the lab rat in Norway.

Coping with the loss of her mom? How long are we going to keep hearing about this. Between her and Shannon Roxbury going on for years about fraling with the death of her grandmother ny God people get over it already life goes on

you give no numbers to go with your statement. "copious hours of cycling". then you give an amateur therapeutic / psychological reason for all this supposed copious amount of cycling she is doing. and what is to you anyway concerning the reasons she is riding so much. it sounds like you have no clue as to how many hours of training are done by any pro athlete in any sport. are you currently a student at princeton? if you are, it appears you're going to have a rough road to graduate. if you already graduated from there, it must have been in theater, or art. something along those lines.

I just want to congratulate the OP on making much ado about nothing. I want to tab a few points:

1) Emma has an established aerobic tank that she built and needs to maintain

2) She is not the only "elite" who went through a bike phase. Colleen Quigley did too. And I just want to say, like a runner gone swimming, that regimen has an early window of time in which athletes not used to the exercise totally reap the benefits.

3) Depending on where she is in the United States currently, if she is at home, it was just the height of famous wilflower season in the wildflower capital of the world. Instead of running, she could take a highly equipped bike between her home, its outskirts and all the way to Aspen for some of the best raw mountain biking in the USA. More power to her if she did this to stay fit and enjoy herself for once.

4) She needs a reset. This recent olympic cycle was a letdown and it puts Tokyo under microscope as the one that got away. She has a lot to process, perhaps some things that she put off.

5) Emma blossomed somewhat late as an elite runner. There was always more to Emma than running. Perhaps this influx of biking has some personal meaning and set of goals attached. She's not a kid by age but she devoted her entire 20s to running ... so let the kid have fun!

I have no more points to share at the moment but there are plenty more.

Oh, and god d*mn you people suck.

Lael Wilcox is almost 2 months into her ride around the world, averaging 174 miles a day so far. Looking at her latest video clip, she looks healthy, at a good weight, and is all smiles. If fully fueled, you can be active an amazing number of hours per week sustainably. In Lael's case, her moving time is 51% of the total time so far, so that's 85-96 hours per week.

correction: 85−86 hours per week.

Agreed power is for the bike and for me an hour ride 160-175watts ave. But your heart is used for bike and run. Was trying to use a common metric. Even, then just an estimate.

Source: some combination of Emma's recent Ali on the Run interview, her Citius interview, and what she has shared in Instagram stories and reels.

Everything has been on a stationary bike so no this is not some passion for cycling that she has found late in her career as some have suggested. During the first part of the injury she was stationary biking 40 hrs per week, with the longest ride being 6 hrs. It also seems time based rather than distance based and all (or almost all?) seems to be very easy intensity (she reads books, watches everything on Netflix under the sun, and listens to Taylor Swift). all riding for the day in one go (ie no doubles). Now that she is back running she is keeping 15 hours or so of easy biking along with the 40 or so miles of running (which is quite low for her).