For the OG Wisco guys that actually did badger miles, they were allegedly averaging below 7:00 mile pace. That's what made badger miles so hard. You run 10 miles in 1 hour, but in badger miles, it counts as less than 9.
Badger miles don't actually work if you are averaging under 7:00 mile pace. Jerry would slap you if you told him that you ran 10 miles in 90 minutes, but you're calling it 13.
If you run slower than 7:00 pace, but say you did to inflate your weekly mileage, that is Reverse Badger Miles, and guys in the 70s did that $hit all the time.
Yes. I assume the point was to slow down those sub 7 runs to close to 7 minute pace.
That is a reasonable assumption. However, it sounds like the Wisco guys were doing their easy runs well closer to 6:00 pace. It seems like the point of Badger Miles is actually to ensure that your runs are a certain duration (of time), rather than put a governor on your pace.
Yes. I assume the point was to slow down those sub 7 runs to close to 7 minute pace.
That is a reasonable assumption. However, it sounds like the Wisco guys were doing their easy runs well closer to 6:00 pace. It seems like the point of Badger Miles is actually to ensure that your runs are a certain duration (of time), rather than put a governor on your pace.
per Wisconsin runner Josh Spiker - "Back when Martin (Martin Smith) coached, regular runs were supposed to be at 7-minute mile pace. Everything is rounded up to the nearest 5 minute interval, unless it hits the time exactly (35 minute is 5 miles…we dont round to 40.) We dont think we are better than anyone else with these miles…it was just a concept that was introduced and stuck. We all like it because it takes the guesswork out of mileage and we generally underestimate our real mileage (we generally run faster than 7-minute pace.) On workout days we count everything as real mileage (except warm-ups and cooldowns.) For example if we do a 10-mile tempo run (we have all of our tempo runs marked) we count that as 10, but may do a 15 minute cooldown and warm-up to hit 14 miles total."
so it sounds like the goal was to get the runners to slow down, but it may not have entirely worked.
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I've been reliably told (and seen the running logs) guys back in the 70's and 80's ran 5-6000 miles a year. No real time off, raced 20 times a year, poor diets in general, little to no fueling during races, and never ended up overtrained. How is that possible?
Many did end up overtrained with subpar performances. I know because I was one of them. Even though IPLOD I still did a lot of mileage relative to my nearly non-existent ability. No support system and shoes had no support, e.g., Tiger Onitsuka had a paper thin outsole and no midsole cushioning at all. Boston had no aid stations at all so people relied on carbo loading the days before. Race started at noon and I remember running a couple of consecutive years when it was just too warm (I think it was 1976 & 77). Another thing was intervals just about every day. Distances varied by the theory that you “stress different systems.” Ha! Fatigue is fatigue - choose your lactate poison. Do I regret any of this? Not at all, I just laugh at how things were back then.
I've been reliably told (and seen the running logs) guys back in the 70's and 80's ran 5-6000 miles a year. No real time off, raced 20 times a year, poor diets in general, little to no fueling during races, and never ended up overtrained. How is that possible?ex
Old guy here -- there was a "survival of the fittest" element in play here as well. That is, there were lots of people at the time who tried the high mileage and broke down or burned out. Then they reverted back to their 40 or 50 miles a week. The ones that could manage it were physiologic mutants with exceptional ability to recover.
I've been reliably told (and seen the running logs) guys back in the 70's and 80's ran 5-6000 miles a year. No real time off, raced 20 times a year, poor diets in general, little to no fueling during races, and never ended up overtrained. How is that possible?
Many did end up overtrained with subpar performances. I know because I was one of them. Even though IPLOD I still did a lot of mileage relative to my nearly non-existent ability. No support system and shoes had no support, e.g., Tiger Onitsuka had a paper thin outsole and no midsole cushioning at all. Boston had no aid stations at all so people relied on carbo loading the days before. Race started at noon and I remember running a couple of consecutive years when it was just too warm (I think it was 1976 & 77). Another thing was intervals just about every day. Distances varied by the theory that you “stress different systems.” Ha! Fatigue is fatigue - choose your lactate poison. Do I regret any of this? Not at all, I just laugh at how things were back then.
Its not like Lydiard wasn't around and being disseminated then. But I imagine, unless you came across a good coach at some point, you just never came across his training philosophy and never thought anything was wrong with intervals every day.
I've been reliably told (and seen the running logs) guys back in the 70's and 80's ran 5-6000 miles a year. No real time off, raced 20 times a year, poor diets in general, little to no fueling during races, and never ended up overtrained. How is that possible?
Guys 'back in the day' got injured a LOT. It was very rare to have a long career that was competitive.
Running on concrete ruined it! I see even professionals today running a lot on hard surfaces! Back then 90% was on dirt!
Absolutely not. Obviously some running was done on soft ground but most of us ran mostly on roads. One of Bill Rodgers' main venues was a 1.6 mile asphalt path around Jamaica Pond.
LOL. This post here shows how people were running 130mpw. If Bill Rodgers called the path around Jamaica Pond 1.6 miles and ran around it 10 times he was calling it 16 miles. But the path around Jamaica Pond is less than 1.5 miles...
Absolutely not. Obviously some running was done on soft ground but most of us ran mostly on roads. One of Bill Rodgers' main venues was a 1.6 mile asphalt path around Jamaica Pond.
LOL. This post here shows how people were running 130mpw. If Bill Rodgers called the path around Jamaica Pond 1.6 miles and ran around it 10 times he was calling it 16 miles. But the path around Jamaica Pond is less than 1.5 miles...
Why would you assume he always ran around it ten times? And my point here is that someone who says 90% of the miles people ran back then were on dirt have no idea what they're talking about. Also it's been years and years since I've thought about Jamaica Pond at all so it's no surprise that I had the distance wrong.
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They crippled themselves, or are dead already. Do enough searching on here (and other places) and you will find all these high mileage runners have long term health issues. The crazy thing is a lot of them were doing it as a hobby,
They crippled themselves, or are dead already. Do enough searching on here (and other places) and you will find all these high mileage runners have long term health issues. The crazy thing is a lot of them were doing it as a hobby,
Do enough searching and you'll find all sorts of older people with long term health issues.
They crippled themselves, or are dead already. Do enough searching on here (and other places) and you will find all these high mileage runners have long term health issues. The crazy thing is a lot of them were doing it as a hobby,
I do agree most runners from the 1970s are dead or can't run anymore. But what's the goal? is it to be good in your 20s and 30s? Or is it to be able to run when you are 80?
They crippled themselves, or are dead already. Do enough searching on here (and other places) and you will find all these high mileage runners have long term health issues. The crazy thing is a lot of them were doing it as a hobby,
I do agree most runners from the 1970s are dead or can't run anymore. But what's the goal? is it to be good in your 20s and 30s? Or is it to be able to run when you are 80?
Some runners from the 70s are dead. Most are still around. But most of us wanted to be as good as we could at the time and didn't spend much time thinking about being 80.
They didn't have GPS back then, so they just rounded up. Yeah I know, you measured the route with your car odometer sometimes, but admit it, back then, everyone rounded up a little bit. 100mpw in 1970 is the equivalent of about 83mpw in 2026.
Also, a lot of times they may have been doing "reverse badger miles", that is, using time watch time to measure distance, and assuming they were going about 7:00 mile pace the whole way.
Are you one of those era or are you imagining how life must have been pre Garmin? Usually you odo would have been out by max 2% depending on tyres etc, but there used to be km (or miles) check distances, usually 5km, you still find a few but not so common, to 'check speedo'. Then you also had races and time trials measured by wheels which gave runners asense of pace. That is something you dont find in modern runners, no sense of pace, they need garmin to tell them. You are really saying that someone would run 8.3miles at say 6mim and write it down as 10miles at 5min!!
Back in early 80's I ran an '18.4km' tough mountain race in 62:20 and placed 3rd. I've always thought it may have been short because it equilibrates to 71:20 HM, and I was probably in 70min flat course shape
I measured it with Garmin in 2010, and guess what? 18.4km...that was probably my best year of running, most of PB's from that time
I am of the pre-garmin era. When I ran competitively, it was before GPS watches were useful or practical. In high school, the standard "4 mile" out-and-back route was later measured to be 3.8 miles. When we had practice, we would do that route at least twice a week, either as a recovery run or as part of a warmup. The "8 mile loop" we did in college was actually 7.5. I know that there were a lot of times where I ran for 70 minutes, and called it "10 miles" even though the average pace for the whole run, in hindsight, was closer to 7:10 or 7:20. Maybe that kind of rounding error doesn't change your weekly mileage very much, but in the scale of a training cycle or a yearly mileage total, it adds up.
LOL. This post here shows how people were running 130mpw. If Bill Rodgers called the path around Jamaica Pond 1.6 miles and ran around it 10 times he was calling it 16 miles. But the path around Jamaica Pond is less than 1.5 miles...
Why would you assume he always ran around it ten times? And my point here is that someone who says 90% of the miles people ran back then were on dirt have no idea what they're talking about. Also it's been years and years since I've thought about Jamaica Pond at all so it's no surprise that I had the distance wrong.
I'm not attacking you. I'm just pointing out that your post shows that there was probably some innocent over estimation. Bill was know for running endless laps of Jamaica Pond. Bob Hodge's site says he's run thousands of laps. If, for example, he called it 1.6 miles when it was 1.45, it starts to add up.
Lindgren was the GOAT of mileage. I do not know how he kept his health given the volume. If he had not stepped in a hole, he would have won gold at 18 in Tokyo. An amazing singularity who would have been unbeatable in today's system.
Im meeting a former badger at the weekend, Antony Ford, who ran with teg, solinsky, bairu, nelson, eagon snd lockhart so can ask first hand about the badger miles and what tbey did What i can say is that they normally in cross season ran anywhere between 80-100mpw with 2 sessions and a long steady run and would abstain from the beer right until after the ncaa's.