Guys back in the day ran 130mpw hard, how did they recover?

Thanks! I was a 400/800 guy in high school (really I was a soccer player at a school where we were required to play a sport every season). "800 dude" was the handle I used when I first posted here 20+ years ago, as I was trying to figure out what this distance running stuff was all about. I probably would've put considerable more thought into what I wanted to be called if I had realized I'd still be posting here in my 40s, but I think it just auto-populated the field every time I was on here, and it's too late to change now!

I still probably skew fast-twitch, at least compared to people who finish around me in marathons, but I like the fact that a fast-twitch guy can still be good at long distances if he puts in the miles.

They didn't. They weren't superhuman.

I was in high school and college back in the 80's and was able to observe what lots of older accomplished runners were doing, mostly in New Jersey. A lot of the detailed comments above ring true regarding diet, shoes, less distractions, and small groups of hardcore athletes.

I can add that I ran with top marathoner Tom Fleming at least several times. I recall doing 10 miles at 6 min pace on a flat loop before dusk. He told me that he did that pretty much every day, twice.

10 miles in a.m., 10miles in p m. It could've been more like 5:45 a mile, but would say no faster. I remember it being somewhat hard but quite steady, and I was a 4:18 to 4:20 miler at the time.

Less on topic, but here's a few other observations from the era:

-Most who showed up to races were fairly serious runners. The middle/back of packers respected the fast guys and gals and put in a good effort themselves.

-Race fees were reasonable, like $7 for a Sunday 10k. In my area, Dean Shonts of The Sneaker Factory put on a weekly race series. Out/back, your pick 2 miles or 4 miles Cost $1. No T-shirt or goody bag. Popcycle stick with your place # at finish line Directors held races for the love of the sport.

5-6,000/ year is not high mileage.

6am-14pm =20/day=140/week.

Any college runner can handle this. AM run easy 6:30/mile.PM easy 3-4 warm up then "core" workout is combo distance of 6 hard with 3 cool down.

40 weeks@140/week =5,600 miles/year. That's 12 weeks less than 52.

I was just thinking about your post. How much were you running before trying the higher mileage thing? Was there any specific motivation, or just out of curiosity? Again, thanks for posting, it really hit home what it was like to test and explore what your body was capable of. It's a real sense of accomplishment. You made me smile.

Of course that is high mileage, and any college runner can't handle it. Naps are needed and college kids still do classes don't they? It's cool that you think that way, but just try it for 5-6 weeks if you dare? Good luck.

Have you done 5,000 plus a year?

A lot of older guys exaggerated how much they ran or thought they were running more. I remember when I got my first GPS watch I measured my usually running routes and the distance was less than I thought.

Naw. Even when I grew up more recently running 20-25 years ago it wasn't "mainstream" to have a GPS watch to measure and track your training routes and distance.

We used cars and bikes (and "map my run") to measure routes and find mile marker splits (I've found my old routes to be very accurate actually as if you know your body well and what "6-min per mile" or 7-min per mile" average actually feels like on a route it was easy to estimate distance by sheer time.) You actually taught yourself how to pace by doing lots of track workouts.

Even when I started running at Hansons (not until 2009) I'd watch guys like Brian Sell crank 150-miles a week (down from his 165-170 miles a week at 5:40/mile pace average when he made the 2008 Olympic team and ran 2:10). Total blue collar badass.

We fueled and recovered on pizza and beer and pancakes....inbetween double runs we were working 5-7 hour shifts on our feet at the running stores.

The guys that couldn't handle 130-140 miles a week simply got injured! (there were lots of injuries).

Once. 1039, 1479, 1523, 1409 = 5450

Exactly. You learn pace over years and years of doing it. It's continually being reinforced. Just like a gymnast learns balance, or a right fielder knows he can throw out a runner at third base. It's what they do. There is no "exaggeration" involved. Only an idiot never learns pace.

I was asking the guy who said 5,000-6,000 miles a year isn't high mileage. My biggest years was 5448.

I like this thread 😃

I have often posted in the threads about justifying high mileage as a slow runner, as I strung together a few 5,000 mile years in my late 20s, early 30s.

I've been reading these boards since the beginning and was motivated to try to maintain 100 mpw as long as I could after reading the training logs of Malmo, Hodgie-San, Greg Meyer, and others from that era.

I set big personal bests in everything from 5k to half marathon trying to adapt their training logs to my ability level, while trying to keep the mileage around 100 mpw.

As HRE said, this naturally resulted in lots of very easy miles (probably around 50 mpw).

Would have I done better with lower mileage with a higher percentage of quality?

Maybe, but for me, probably not since I trained that way in college.

Am I more burnt out as a Master's runner because of those 4 years? Probably, but it was worth going for it in my "prime" 🙂

I know who you were asking. I was just making a point that getting that much in a year, is a lot. 5200 is an average of only 100mpw, which doesn't seem like much, but it is. When you say "consistency is important" don't take it literally as in "the same mileage every week". It means focus, persistence, achievement, yes, rest is all part of consistency. If JP Morgan was a running coach who was asked about mileage, he'd probably say, "It will fluctuate", and he would be right.

Ron Hill normally did 100-120 a week but he had two 4-6 week stretches of what he called "active rest," about 30-40 miles a week. He said that was the most important part of his training. interestingly, at least to me, was that he kept doing 13 runs a week at those times.

This is a great example of a way that people in the pre-GPS time over-estimated the distance of their runs. You might have thought you were dialed in to 6:00 pace or 7:00 pace or whatever, but any serious runner knows that your perceived effort at a given pace will fluctuate wildly.

On all those runs, do you really think you started with a 7-flat first mile, and then maintained the exact same pace over the course of the run, despite terrain fluctuations?

I don't have logs from back in the day, but while playing college soccer I adopted a practice of running 4 miles most mornings that I didn't have a game. In the off season, I started working up to 12-14 miles on the weekends, just for fun. I was also pretty good friends with the XC team (more than my soccer teammates, to be honest), and their influence definitely got me more interested. I did a marathon senior year, with one of my soccer teammates, and I thought that qualifying for Boston might be a good goal for after college. Amateur soccer was just not fun for me. (In a lot of regions, there's like one good team of near-pro level players, and then all the other teams are full of guys who, even if they used to be good, are too out of shape to really play the game the way it's meant to be played. At least that's how it was 20 years ago.)

I actually ended up running with a club after college and doing more track/xc, with mileage around 80-90, for years. I would run occasional non-workout days at low-6 pace, or what I'd today call aerobic threshold, but a lot of my mileage was over 8-minute pace. It wasn't until my late 20s that I returned to the marathon and consistent mileage over 100, with slight increases each cycle until I felt like I'd hit the right volume. The bigger difference wasn't the volume, though, it was that I had developed to the point where I could do 100+ while averaging sub-7 for the entire week. It took years and years for my legs to get that resilient.

Back then, I was pretty unusual as a competitive runner who hadn't run in the NCAA. I love the fact that it's changing now. I run with tons of sub 2:30 marathoners who didn't start running until after college.

That doesn't show that runners over-estimated their runs at all.