For the purpose of racing 5k and up faster, is there such thing as too many uninjured miles?

from personal experience i'd be just as/more concerned i get myself anemic/sick running too much.

my personal experience my train 2x week for 90 min select team could run my train 5x week 2 hours college team off the soccer field. i personally believe in a lower ratio of the meet distance but fuller gas. maybe around 2-3x race distance per workout. sprinters do not run 100m x 16 to train to do one straightaway for time. it's about a 3x ratio max.

people are copying pros who have nothing else to their days.

I would imagine something akin to the law of diminishing returns would come into play at a certain mileage point. That amount likely differs based on the individual and the target events.

Of course you can run too much.

Have you never heard of "overtraining"?

You can do it two ways: too much intensity and too much volume. I will add the caveat that there isn't a set limit on either, but if you ramp either up too quickly your performances will suffer - even if you don't get injured.

Also, if you're doing too much and not recovering enough to do quality workouts, you won't be getting the best out of yourself.

I genuinely thought that truly overtraining would lead to injuries the vast majority of the time. Is that not the case? I guess too many easy miles can still hurt the workouts?

Too much training can hurt sleep. It can make you tired. It can make legs rubbery. It negatively impacts workouts. Some people run best at 40 MPW. Some at 60 MPW. Some at 100 MPW.

If you have ever done another endurance sport you would know that overtraining and getting sick are major dangers outside of injury. For hobby runners it is less common as most people run too fast every day and end up injured first. If you are training properly overtraining is a major concern. Most ultra runners will end up overtrained at some point.

I trained for several years before attempting my first race. The race was a DNS due to overtraining. The week before the race, I tried to run, but what was a moderate pace according to stopwatch felt like a sprint. Never again.

At some point when ramping up training load, diminishing returns change to negative returns and you will be training your ability to survive the training instead of the ability to race. There are always 24 hours in a day – the more you spend running, the less remains for recovery. Eventually, the whole thing implodes in one way or another.

Yes, accumulated muscular fatigue that will just prevent you from racing at your best and gaining proper adaptions from workouts which will eventually result in a net loss of fitness

Generally speaking, the more miles you put in, the better you’ll be.

but yes, you have to concern yourself with overtraining, getting proper recovery, becoming mentally bored of the miles, etc.

So what is better

200mpw no workout cause the added stress would injure you

180 mpw 1 workout which gets you to the edge

180 wins for almost everyone. Those extra 20 miles were less effective at building fitness than the ability to run 5miles at a faster pace.

You only have so much recovery ability. You have to figure out the balance that maximizes your performance.

I think the main truth of the sport is that - generally speaking - the more consistent miles you run over time (obviously without overtraining or getting injured), the faster you will be.

What’s better is the right number of miles WITH regular workouts and ‘easy’ runs that aren’t too slow because you’re killing yourself in workouts. It’s a balance thing and not one-size-fits-all.

What exactly is "too many miles"?

What exactly is too few miles?

You can overdo almost anything and an answer to a question like this depends on how you're defining too many miles. When Lydiard was figuring his method out by experimenting on himself and some of the early, lesser known guys who were training with him he had a spell when he was doing 200 miles a week. He found that too many miles. He thought he had to run pretty slowly to cover that sort of distance. Injuries were not the problem. He just thought he'd get better results with fewer miles done a bit less slowly and got to the one hundred miles a week number that's so associated with him. BUT he said that was what he'd done in his main session and overall mileage could go much higher if he counted the "supplemental jogging" he recommended. Some of his guys got to more than 150 a week and one or two got to 200 if you counted those jogs in their totals. On the other hand, Snell struggled with mileage. He only had brief times when ho got to 100 and it was usually in two runs. He did not do any supplemental jogging. So what was not too many miles for Barry Magee or Richard Tayler was too many miles for Snell.

A few days ago I started a thread here linking to an article about Lou Scott, the third man to make the USA's 5,000 meter team for the '68 Olympics. Scott said he ran 50 MILES a day in his preparation. That seemed unbelievably, especially high and I was hoping someone who'd known him would see the thread and either confirm or deny that. No one did, but yesterday I saw something about Ted Corbitt and his training for the London to Brighton one year posted by his son. Ted had three weeks of over 300 miles done while working full time as a massage therapist. And of course Gerry Lindgren was reportedly doing 350 mile weeks at one time.

Scott made an Olympic team. Lindgren did too and was briefly a world record holder. Corbitt made an Olympic team and was the best ultra marathoner in the US and one of the best in the world. Could any of them accomplished as much on fewer miles? Who knows? But given what they did accomplish it seems hard to say the miles they did were too many. I'm sure for most people that kind of mileage would be counterproductive, i.e., too much. I'm also sure that for most of today's runners an amount of mileage that they think is too many miles could be beneficial.

yea (duh)

i get some want to say it worked for them, but for me upping mileage blew up a season and gave me anemia. but i was a two sport guy who was playing top level select soccer same time, like, meet saturday (in an area with good XC teams) game sunday (on a regular final 4 state team who won state twice), 5 XC practices a week, 2 soccer practices.

tangentially related point, it also jumped out to me that the pecking order of the team often shifted when we tapered at the end. to me this gets waved off as someone "stepping up for the big meet," but maybe it's some team members reacting to less work and more rest. we had a guy go from 3rd slot to being the one who advanced towards state. i beat a couple of our guys i usually finished behind. i am not a fan of one size fits all, particularly for athletes juggling other demands. i also think some coaching ego comes in here, like if you can say your team runs more or does different, you can take more credit for what the runners do. kind of like in soccer tactics are all the rage these days and to me this aggrandizes coaches over the players who juke someone, hit a pinpoint cross or shot, or otherwise make things happen. i always thought coaching was a marginal factor that decided close events. if you don't have the team you aren't close. if you are loaded the team might do it without you. more the in-between cases. anyhow, my point being, there are great coaches who have a machine that makes kids amazing over 4 years, and then there are ones who get cute then take credit if anyone succeeds, or ones who outright overwork people. and "plan talk" often aggrandizes coaching as though all are equal.

but anyhow, this whole discussion to me leaves it a little too uncomfortably he said she said. surely there is some science and statistics as opposed to competing anecdotes. like, you do x approach, y% of kids are fine, z% get eating disorders, a% have health problems, b% get injured. probabilities as opposed to just competing stories. or a more scientific version of "seems to work for x but not for y." as in like body or psychological types that fare better or worse.

I don't really get injured ever but if I'm running more than 75 miles a week for many consecutive weeks I get insanely tired and my legs feel super heavy all the time to the point that my workouts suck. I feel like I'm the only one who has this happen. I just get incredibly tired in place of where most people would get injured