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Now what peoples often get wrong :
- A coach should NOT have a low or high mileage only, philosophy of training. Their coaching should rely only on the individual and their natural qualities, some will benefit more of high mileage low quality, others from low mileage, high quality, and intermediates of theses 2 type of training. I think coaches often believe in one thing, which is for one athlete the key to success, so they put every athlete on the same training, neglecting that every door has a different key.
- An athlete should work on his qualities rather than his weakness, you can't make a bird with a fish, but you can always improve the swimming of the fish. A lot of people's here believe that someone with, for exemple, a 1500m runner with a good 800m and a bad 5k, can just run more miles and he will be a better at 1500m, that's false, if he relies on mostly speed, his speed can only suffer if he starts training like a 5k runner. What he should do is run an appropriate mileage for him, focus on improving his speed and speed endurance so he can sustain more of his 800m speed on a 1500m, knowing that he cannot be and will never be a slow twitch type runner, and therefore cannot train like one.
(Obvisouly this point is relative, you cannot neglect your weaknesses, but what I'm trying to explain is that you cannot work on your weaknesses the same way as someone for whom that's the strengths.)
- People should not discourage young kids from running high mileage, and even humiliate them for that (In Europe that's very common to mock someone doing that, instead of helping him). The biggest cause of burnout is mental, if a kid want to run high mileage, he loves it, and he thinks that he can handle it and that it will help him to improve, just let him do what he wants, that's his life and if he enjoys it you should not try to convince him otherwise ( I saw that a lot in European kids). Instead of impede him to do his thing, you should accompany him and help him to make sure he does it the right way and keep him out of "harm's ways", because then it will only result on him still running his high mileage but hiding it and maybe doing it the dumb way (easy runs too fast, giving too much in workouts to recover from the high mileage he's doing, etc... ) And, my friends THAT'S WHAT RESULTS IN BURNOUT. So you forced him to not run a lot so he doesn't burnout, but by doing that, you just pushed him to hide it, do dumb stuff, and finally burnout.
And the final thing is the biggest misconception in running :
- A lot of easy mileage (we're talking about slow twitch people's here) does not reduce the margin of progression at all, it increases it. Someone who runs let's say, 15 miles, in 2 workout a weeks, will likely have a smaller margin of lifetime improvement than someone who's running 2 workouts and 4 easy runs.
That's hard to believe but think of it like a tank :
- Easy runs increase the capacity of the tank
- Workouts fill the tank
To run fast you need to have the biggest volume of fuel in your tank.
A youngster running a lot of easy miles will not necessarily see big improvements in the moment, but he is building an insane tank, which will allow him to handle a bigger workload later and improves a lot more once he starts intensity.
On the other hand, the typical high-school guy, running less mileage, but more workout, will see quicker improvement, fulfilling his tank faster, but he will eventually reach a plateau because he made the most out of the small aerobic base he has.
Then he will increase his mileage, increase the capacity of his tank, see some improvement, and think that he did it the best way, and upping his mileage, he will eventually get a lot of injuries and think that's the max mileage he can handle, he could even think that he already has made the most out of his talent. But while he's doing that, the other guy who ran a lot of easy miles during his youth already has an insane tank with twice the capacity and just has to start some intensity work to improve significantly with a smaller risk of injury (thanks to the high slow mileage he did, he got a super tank, and can now handle very hard training without breaking down).
You often confuse high mileage low intensity and high mileage high intensity, Jakob, when he was a 3:48 1500m runner, was running his easy runs at 12kmh (8:03 min per mile).
But you see a lot of highschool studs who are running a lot (more than 60 miles a week) running their « easy miles » way too fast with no real easy days, and that's why you see Jakob improved years after years while they don’t improve. Instead of increasing the capacity of their tank with their easy runs, it’s almost like they’re trying to fill it, so they have great fast results, but then they just don’t have more space to fulfill.
That's sad but young kids running high mileage should absolutely not do that, and it has nothing to do with what Jakob was doing, and you guys on letsrun always fail to understand that.
I realise it does not have much to do with the original subject, but I wanted to clarify things for once, if someone has read the whole thing, understands what I'm trying to say, and has the knowledge or experience to give a pertinent opinion, then feel free to tell me what you think about it. If not, then just ignore my big message.
It just makes me mad when people use the excuse of high mileage in youngsters to say they can't improve, that's the opposite (you all saw it with Jakob when he was young, El Guerrouj etc...)
Or even when people say that east African are only superior because of genetics and doping, but that's funny when you put another guy on the same training, he almost always end up being nearly, or even as good as them. Now just think about what would we get if we put a million kids on this training regimen like the east Africans are doing without knowing it.
Sorry for any grammatical error, English isn't my first language and I honestly don't have the courage to reread the whole message.