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.
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. I
Non workout days? I hear that a lot on LRC. All days are workout days, unless, or course, you didn't run.
Coincidentally I started running during junior high (7-8-9) soccer too. Our coach was really big on running fitness, so every day before practice we ran laps around the field. Generally we basically raced each other. Me and my teammate, Otto Mazzoni, would run anywhere from 12-20 laps. Then wind sprints. Then drills. Then half field scrimmages. Then wind sprints again. We did it every day. In soccer cleats. Otto and I both set the Maryland State Meet records subsequently in high school, which would still stand as #1 and #2 times in Meet history today. Except that they allowed a 23 year old grown man from Ethiopia run one year. And people beef about 24 year old Kenyans running in college?
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?
That doesn't show that runners over-estimated their runs at all.
Thank you malmo for some basic logic here! I consider myself to be "very good at pacing" and knowing how to read my body on any given mile of running.
I didn't get my first "GPS watch" until we were going into the 2012 Olympic Marathon Trials at Houston (under Hansons). It wasn't very accurate either!
But in highschool and college we'd use cars and bike odometers (I actually had digital measuring wheel that I ran routes with to cross-check) and "Map my run" etc.
It was amazing to go back and measure routes that i had "estimated" on to be very close to the mileage I had predicted in all my years running them by feel.
No, what you would do is run a specific route (in hs it was what we thought was a rough 7-mile road loop). Some days you'd be dragging and probably estimate you'd averaged 7:30 pace. Some days you'd be feeling good and know you probably dropped some 6:40s but averaged around 7flat etc. If you kept running the same loop and matched your RPE with what you estimated the pace to be...you got a pretty good idea about what distance it would be around....
Sure, maybe some routes were "off" by 0.25 miles or 0.33 miles in total on a 10-mile run. In the grand scheme of a 100-mile + training week it didn't really matter. I did a lot of hilly trail runs also....pace really goes out the window on those. I didn't really care if I ran a "105-mile" or "108 mile" training week as the stimulus was there.
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?
That doesn't show that runners over-estimated their runs at all.
Yes it does. You need to work on your reading comprehension.
If you log a 70 minute run as "10 miles" even though you were averaging 7:10 pace, then you over-estimated your run.
That doesn't show that runners over-estimated their runs at all.
Yes it does. You need to work on your reading comprehension.
If you log a 70 minute run as "10 miles" even though you were averaging 7:10 pace, then you over-estimated your run.
In your example a runner would need to continue at that pace for another 100 seconds to reach 10 miles. You sound like you record sessions to the hundredth. It's simply not a big enough deal to stress over. Guys with gps today freak out if they don't have all the metrics. In reality you can improve even if you never track exact pace or only track it for your workouts (defined as faster than easy pace sessions). A couple percent on mileage simply doesn't matter - even in the unlikely scenario you're always off in the same direction.
This post was edited 1 minute after it was posted.
back in my day, to measure mileage this how we did it
You clearly had a lousy geography teacher. Long ago I recall having to lay string along an Ordnance Survey map, hold it against the scale, and "do the mapometer thing" the hard way. Takes a while, but when you have done it you can run the same course every week and the distance stays the same...
Yes it does. You need to work on your reading comprehension.
If you log a 70 minute run as "10 miles" even though you were averaging 7:10 pace, then you over-estimated your run.
In your example a runner would need to continue at that pace for another 100 seconds to reach 10 miles. You sound like you record sessions to the hundredth. It's simply not a big enough deal to stress over. Guys with gps today freak out if they don't have all the metrics. In reality you can improve even if you never track exact pace or only track it for your workouts (defined as faster than easy pace sessions). A couple percent on mileage simply doesn't matter - even in the unlikely scenario you're always off in the same direction.
This was an example, used to illustrate my point that using time to estimate your distance is not always accurate, and that runners have a tendency to over-estimate their pace. In my experience, runners almost always estimate their pace if not given some kind of mechanism to test it and keep you honest, so I don't buy your point that being "always off in the same direction" is an "unlikely scenario." Be honest with yourself, do you round down just as often as you round up?
Sage, you claim to be "very good at pacing," but, as a very experienced runner, you should know that many factors can cause your perceived effort at a given pace to fluctuate, such as hydration levels, dew point, cumulative fatigue from previous workouts. Maybe you're fighting off a viral infection, maybe your left hip flexor is tight that day and it's causing a hitch in your stride, maybe there's high levels of tree pollen and your airways are marginally restricted. Even the surface you're running on is going to have an impact. Unless you have found a way to run maintaining a constant stride length and stride frequency with machine-like precision, you are not going to be able to measure your exact pace by just doing a vibe check.
Look, I know I ruffled some feathers telling you old-timers that your "100 mile weeks" were actually more like 95 miles. That still doesn't take away from your PRs, or your wins, or the struggles you went through putting in that mileage. Just like some of you think that times run in super-shoes don't count, I think that measuring miles per week in the 70s was less accurate than it was now.
In your example a runner would need to continue at that pace for another 100 seconds to reach 10 miles. You sound like you record sessions to the hundredth. It's simply not a big enough deal to stress over. Guys with gps today freak out if they don't have all the metrics. In reality you can improve even if you never track exact pace or only track it for your workouts (defined as faster than easy pace sessions). A couple percent on mileage simply doesn't matter - even in the unlikely scenario you're always off in the same direction.
This was an example, used to illustrate my point that using time to estimate your distance is not always accurate, and that runners have a tendency to over-estimate their pace. In my experience, runners almost always estimate their pace if not given some kind of mechanism to test it and keep you honest, so I don't buy your point that being "always off in the same direction" is an "unlikely scenario." Be honest with yourself, do you round down just as often as you round up?
Sage, you claim to be "very good at pacing," but, as a very experienced runner, you should know that many factors can cause your perceived effort at a given pace to fluctuate, such as hydration levels, dew point, cumulative fatigue from previous workouts. Maybe you're fighting off a viral infection, maybe your left hip flexor is tight that day and it's causing a hitch in your stride, maybe there's high levels of tree pollen and your airways are marginally restricted. Even the surface you're running on is going to have an impact. Unless you have found a way to run maintaining a constant stride length and stride frequency with machine-like precision, you are not going to be able to measure your exact pace by just doing a vibe check.
Look, I know I ruffled some feathers telling you old-timers that your "100 mile weeks" were actually more like 95 miles. That still doesn't take away from your PRs, or your wins, or the struggles you went through putting in that mileage. Just like some of you think that times run in super-shoes don't count, I think that measuring miles per week in the 70s was less accurate than it was now.
No one is debating that gps is more accurate than measurement in the pre gps era. Measurements simply weren't off enough to matter. It's why gps wasn't a game changer the way carbon plates, pace lights, mondo, and pace tuned indoor tracks are.
In your example a runner would need to continue at that pace for another 100 seconds to reach 10 miles. You sound like you record sessions to the hundredth. It's simply not a big enough deal to stress over. Guys with gps today freak out if they don't have all the metrics. In reality you can improve even if you never track exact pace or only track it for your workouts (defined as faster than easy pace sessions). A couple percent on mileage simply doesn't matter - even in the unlikely scenario you're always off in the same direction.
This was an example, used to illustrate my point that using time to estimate your distance is not always accurate, and that runners have a tendency to over-estimate their pace. In my experience, runners almost always estimate their pace if not given some kind of mechanism to test it and keep you honest, so I don't buy your point that being "always off in the same direction" is an "unlikely scenario." Be honest with yourself, do you round down just as often as you round up?
Sage, you claim to be "very good at pacing," but, as a very experienced runner, you should know that many factors can cause your perceived effort at a given pace to fluctuate, such as hydration levels, dew point, cumulative fatigue from previous workouts. Maybe you're fighting off a viral infection, maybe your left hip flexor is tight that day and it's causing a hitch in your stride, maybe there's high levels of tree pollen and your airways are marginally restricted. Even the surface you're running on is going to have an impact. Unless you have found a way to run maintaining a constant stride length and stride frequency with machine-like precision, you are not going to be able to measure your exact pace by just doing a vibe check.
Look, I know I ruffled some feathers telling you old-timers that your "100 mile weeks" were actually more like 95 miles. That still doesn't take away from your PRs, or your wins, or the struggles you went through putting in that mileage. Just like some of you think that times run in super-shoes don't count, I think that measuring miles per week in the 70s was less accurate than it was now.
Some of us knew that All-American awards, NCAA Championships, prize money etc were not handed out in practice, so we weren’t worried whether the run was 9.12 miles or 8.94 miles, for example. Michael Musyoki claimed he ran one hour a day, and it could be 9 miles or it could be 12 miles, for example, and I really think you are discussing something which is not as significant as you seem to think it is. Tell me why this is important to you.
It's important because a lot of people are replying with strong feelings about the topic.
So if said I was going to urinate in your backyard and “a lot of people” replied “with strong feelings about the topic,” would you deem it to be important?