A few years ago I was listening to a few well known and successful coaches answer athlete’s questions. One HS runner asked something like “how many miles should I be running and how many will we run in college.” The men’s coach answered with big numbers and the women’s coach answered with surprisingly small numbers and said they do a lot of cross training.
It is all relative of course, but who are the successful men’s coaches who have their athletes run relatively lower miles, and what does that look like? I would assume they aren’t all basically the same.