High school training in the 70s... was it really this insane?!?

I believe a lot of it. Things were so much less organized back then, if you really wanted to be good you found your own limits. It was also an ear where really young runners were globally competitive. Gerry Lindgrin, Jim Ryun, Pre etc.

Serna was a little guy, probably could bounce back day after day more so than bigger runners. I do take everything we a grain of salt. No GPS or really good stop watches for training.

Different creatures back then.

They ran mostly by feel, so if that was how fast they felt comfortable running (or felt they needed to run that fast), that's how fast they ran. Most didn't know much of anything back then about periodization or slow vs fast twitch aerobic fibers let alone appropriate workout pacing.

Dumb question from a milennial: how did you know how much you ran a week before smart watches, mapping software, etc? Drive all your common running routes, and then only run those same routes over and over?

They don't know which is why they are asking. Letsrun is older than today's high school and college students.

There were maps. You'd measure road courses with cars. Sometimes there were courses that had been run for ages and you just took the word of others about its length. Sometimes you just approximated.

Pretty much like that, except you measured legs of you running routes and spliced them together. It wasn't difficult to add and subtract back then. Math was still the same.

Ironically I'm a millennial too but just one that's super interested in running culture from the 70s! I blame Pre, old Letsrun threads, and the fact that Jeff Nelson was from my part of the Valley I grew up in so discovering these guys as a high school runner was about the coolest thing ever. But even as a millennial, most of our routes in high school had an accepted distance from coach and it wasn't until a few of us got GPS watches as upper classman that we realized they could be off.

I'm willing to accept some mileage "inflation" sure but still there's not getting around some of the craziness. With that Serna training listed, I had to go back and check the context of the article I posted because I'm still not totally sure if that is just a list of workout days that would then be offset by recovery days inbetween or if he really did that schedule of days back to back (with an 8th day thrown in there because a true hardcore runner back then ran like The Beatles, 8 days a week!). I guess whatever it is, you can't argue with results! CA high schoolers won world jr xc multiple times in the 70s and guys like Serna were right up there with the champs like Hulst and Kimball.

I gave away my copy of "The Long Green Line" but can assure you that *some* high school kids were doing ungodly training.

Joe Newton had dozens (plural) of guys in his 1000 Mile Club: a thousand miles of summer training--including many guys who would never run a varsity race. And the fall training of his York HS guys would build on that.

A little additional info here: https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=296799

I can't speak for places like California...

But it was rare in the 1970s to actually have a coach who was actually a runner/former runner in those days. Most of them didn't have a clue. They trained us in the typical "no pain/no gain" tradition.

In my case we didn't run the volume that others did... but we ran everything really hard...

I once had a high school track coach (not the distance coach) tell me to do the 1000-mile summer. I thought he was nuts, but if I could go back in time, I would do exactly that.

I heard rumors that Rudy Chapa was running up to 130 miles per week in high school, and I believe he still holds the prep 10,000 record at 28:32.

Though they don't teach it the same anymore. If yall got some kids, or nieces and nephews they can show you their HS math and it is completely different.

How many of these kids did anything beyond high school? College? A lot of them seemed to flame out.

GPS watches were barely a thing when I was in high school (late 2000s) and I never owned anything more advanced than a $30 Timex. I ran routes from home, or from friends' houses, that I knew the distances for (out to the village general store and back was 6 miles, certain loops could be strung together to make 8-15 mile totals, one specific road was almost exactly 1 mile end to end, etc). Between knowing my immediate surroundigns and driving some routes in my mom's car with the trip odometer zeroed out, I figured most of it out and extrapolated from there.

As for pace, I didn't really worry about grade-adjusted pace or anything beyond average pace over miles (which may or may not be hilly). I certainly didn't track heart rate, didn't have any digital coaching aids, etc — I mostly measured my own fitness by how skinny I was and how easy it felt to run 5 hilly miles in <35 minutes once a week, that sort of thing.

Sadly, none of that stopped me from thinking 40mpw was big training. I was horribly mediocre (18:30 was my best 5k in HS) and it had nothing to do with difficulty measuring or tracking my runs.

Are you now ready to take a shot on who is being referred to in this thread?

https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=13088153

I used a measuring wheel if a car wasn't appropriate. Spent time accurately measuring parks and trails - wasn't that expensive to buy. In fact in a local park used chalk (for marking fields) to outline running routes so kids didn't cheat while training on these marked loops (measured by wheel). GPS wasn't necessary and is rather less accurate given the problems with consistency in trails and loops (like parks). People treat GPS as if they are 100% accurate - they are not. One of my early wheels did not have a recording mechanism, so I had to count each meter manually!! A real nuisance when interrupted ( often had to start the counting over again!!).

I grew up in Ohio farm country where all intersections are 1mi apart. Pretty easy to figure out the mileage. 4 miles around the block!

I burned a lot of gas in a pick up truck measuring courses for many years, stopping at each mile to look around for a landmark, squiggly line on the road or something like that.

A lot of it is true, but a lot is definitely exaggerated (looking at you, Gerry).

People were raised differently. Food was better. I'm gonna sound like a boomer, but being raised playing outdoors all day created stronger, tougher, more developed athletes as adolescents. General running participation was also higher, from what I am aware, so a lot more potential talent was discovered.

All of that combined to create some insanely fast athletes doing insane training for the time.

Keep in mind though, many of the well-known athletes that trained like that in the 70s didn't go on to do anything of note. Running 140 miles a week your junior year isn't great for development, super shoes or not.