recently reconnected with a guy I used to know way back. he was a sprinter, not very good but respectable like 11.8 or sth age 15. skinny guy. now he's late twenties and says he does pretty low mileage ~10 miles/week but rides a bicycle 2+ hours a day at least 3 times a week. I only asked how he trains cause he posted a vid doing 4:11 1500m on a track (regular sneakers). is that training likely to be true?
very likely. 2+ hours /at least 3 times (!) per week is a lot of aerobic work. on this good base the guy adds 10 miles of running, i guess quality miles (speed work, repeats). perhaps this sums up to about 8+ hours of training per week. this is absolutely enough for middle distance.
i know some guys capable of 4:10 for 1500m and they do less.
nah he's not exactly a hard worker afaik, most likely walks half these miles, at least back then he used to. my main question is does biking really translate so well to running performance? wasn't my experience, but really I didn't ride OR run enough so...
Biking does translate well to running. It depends how you do it though. A lower volume of high-intensity cycling will help in the 1,500, maybe a bit in the 800 if you're doing sprints or super-anaerobic intervals on the bike. A larger volume of riding with traditional 3-5 minute intervals and 20+ minute efforts will help in the mile a bit, but moreso in events 3k and up.
Sample size of 1, but due to injury I switched to cycling entirely for a roughly 2 year period, then as I felt capable of running again I did like 2 easy runs to see how the injury was, then went for a hard 5k.
I ran a post-college PR time (not lifetime PR, but faster than any time in my 'adult' life)... off of zero miles per week of running, and like 10ish hours per week of cycling.
I'm now trying to figure out if I can do some short running workouts mixed with cycling, see if I can push the mile and 5k times down towards where they were in my peak.