Can anyone site an example of someone that drastically increased their mileage over an extended period of time and then came back to race slower than before? I'm talking about a runner that significantly increased their mileage, say from 60 to 90, or 80 to 120, something like that. And let's not factor injuries into the equation, because obviously that will affect performance.
Of course there are! There are people who have found that training at altitude didn't work for them. People who trained like Seb Coe and it didn't work for them. The key is to find what works best for you, there is no magical recipe that will work for everyone so you just have to keep trying different things and find what the magical recipe is for you.
There are thousands of runners that have increased their mileage and run slower. Why would a question like this get asked? There are also thousands of runners that have added interval training and gotten slower. There are thousands of runners that have added weight training and gotten slower. There are thousands of runners that have added longer runs to their training and ran slower.
Of course, there are thousands of runners that have done each of these things and gotten much better. For some, the increased training will never work for them, for others they just didn't give it enough time. Any time you add something new or harder to your training, it will take some time for it to benefit you. Unfortunately, for some it will never benefit them. Everyone responds to training in a different way and so many people just don't understand that. You can't train like someone else just because it worked for them, you have to figure out what works for you.
Can anyone name examples of runners that upped their mileage (and stayed with it) and got slower? And for the sake of this discussion, let's stick with runners training for 5000 meters and up.
a kid on my team ran 18:40 his freshman year and thought if he ran more during the summer he would make varsity, so he ran 60 mile weeks and ended up 22 minute 5k's all season
did he also lose his penis and magically form a vagina?
kdfjvnser wrote:
a kid on my team ran 18:40 his freshman year and thought if he ran more during the summer he would make varsity, so he ran 60 mile weeks and ended up 22 minute 5k's all season
I call BS.
Got one. This jerk who spends all his time on message boards really sucked his first year of high school cross country and decided to really train hard over the winter. Three stress fractures, no track season.
The mistake I made -- er, I mean, he made, was overtraining. You're capable of overtraining no matter how you structure it. Big milage really does not match up well with rigidity about pace, and that's where people make their mistakes.
That sucks for that Kid, 60 miles is not really even that high.
kdfjvnser wrote:
a kid on my team ran 18:40 his freshman year and thought if he ran more during the summer he would make varsity, so he ran 60 mile weeks and ended up 22 minute 5k's all season
Tell him to run the miles faster.
Tiffany McWilliams?
Ari Lambie?
track dude wrote:
I call BS.
why did you ask the question in the first place if you refuse to believe it when someone gives you an answer?
i have gone from 60-90 over a summer, keeping the mileage high during xc season, and suffered for it. my friend upped his mileage from 40-65 over the winter and got slower.
additionally, why do you say injuries don't count? do you want to pretend they don't exist? higher rate of injury comes with higher mileage. you can't just ignore it.
if higher mileage were always better, elite runners would just run all the time. if at no point it were detrimental to run more mileage, the best training strategy would be to run 24 hours a day every day. do you think that is a good idea? if not, then there must be a point where more mileage is not beneficial.
no, never.
The runner only fails High Mileage.
is a bit of a silly question, I know of a guy who has always run relatively high miles, ~100 right from the beginning, but took it up to around the 160 mark for a while and got really slow and rundown, he still had some alright results ran a ok thon, but all his shorter stuff (under 10km) really suffered and he is only getting this right now.
If you do 50miles of smart training a week, and then drop all sessions, drills etc and just jog 70miles a week then you'll probably get slower. You've got to do it smartly and still balance recovery, once you start overtraining it's very hard to stop.
One summer I ran 110-115/week for 10 weeks. Previously I had run 40-50 over the summers. I did imporved...but barely. Not nearly as much as one would have expected.
Even w/ some rest, I did not significantly drop my times.
Later after I got out of school, started working, and got back into running after +10yrs have I found that I respond much better to hihger intensity workloads (40-80 minutes), few if any intervals etc.
High mileage affects every runner differently, and is NOT a guarantee for success.
meichenl wrote:
track dude wrote:I call BS.
why did you ask the question in the first place if you refuse to believe it when someone gives you an answer?
I refuse to believe it in the example given - upping the mileage to 60 per week and going from an 18 minute 5K to 22 minutes? That sounds far fetched.
Will you believe this?
I went from 30 miles a week to 80 miles a week over the winter before my sophmore high school track season.
I didn't slow down, but I didn't get faster ether.. waste of time.
-ran 8min pace or slower most likely, no idea really
-high mileage means nothing if you walk it
edud kcart wrote:
Will you believe this?
I went from 30 miles a week to 80 miles a week over the winter before my sophmore high school track season.
I didn't slow down, but I didn't get faster ether.. waste of time.
-ran 8min pace or slower most likely, no idea really
-high mileage means nothing if you walk it
Yes, I believe your story and More Faster....I guess higher mileage isn't for everybody.
"high mileage means nothing if you walk it"
I have to disagree. Sometimes very long walks are great for reflection and restoration.